Grüne on work and social affairs

The Greens want all vocational trainees in Hamburg to be able to use buses and trains for free. In addition, far more affordable housing for trainees is to be created.

Trainees should ride buses and trains for free. So far this applies only to school students. The Greens also want many more cheap homes for trainees. Then young people from elsewhere can train in Hamburg too.

The free ticket has applied to students at general-education schools since the 2024/2025 school year and is to be extended to trainees. More affordable housing is meant to let applicants from other German states and from abroad train in Hamburg. At the federal level, the party wants to push for regular adjustment of rent subsidies paid through vocational training aid, BAföG and housing benefit.

The Greens want social benefits to be provided quickly, in a friendly way and without high hurdles. A platform with an app is to bundle all benefits and discounts so that no one loses entitlements out of ignorance, shame or because of complicated procedures.

The Greens want people to get social benefits more easily. An app should show all kinds of help. Offices should work faster. People should be able to do everything without the internet too. Advice centers should get more money.

The social administration is to become simpler and faster through digitalization and automation, while a right to non-digital access applies to every service. Staff freed up this way are to be used for direct contact with applicants. Digital guides are to help close to where people live, and at home for people who are not mobile. Independent social and legal counseling is to get its own funding guideline. The Teilhabenavigator project is to give central access to benefits and to discounts for social and cultural facilities. Social reporting is to be developed further with an advisory board and externally produced reports on living conditions.

The Greens want to help social service providers find and pay for premises and declare this a public task. The contact points for self-help groups are also to be financially secured.

The Greens want to help social organizations. The city should help them find and pay for rooms. Self-help groups should also get reliable funding.

According to the platform, the background is that social service providers are under pressure on the real estate market. The party stands by the subsidiarity principle and a variety of providers. To counter the skilled-worker shortage, providers are to get more leeway, for instance through budgets, and grant rules are to favor good jobs. Self-help contact points are also to get funds for digitalization and accessible services.

The Greens want to develop the emergency overnight shelter system further and create smaller, decentralized shelters. These are also to be open to people with no entitlement to social benefits or without regular residence status.

The Greens want more small emergency shelters in the city. There should be special offers for women and young people. People without residence papers should also be allowed to sleep there. Help on the street should get better.

The platform bases the reform on the right to health and provides for more shelters that tolerate substance use. There are to be suitable places for young adults, women, and trans* and non-binary people. Low-threshold help is to be strengthened, with additional regular services in Harburg, Bergedorf and Wandsbek. Gaps in provision for women and marginalized groups are to be closed. The offices for housing emergencies are to be evaluated externally, and civil society housing placement services are to get better funding.

The Greens want people with mental illness to be better able to stay in or return to work. More counseling is meant to prevent those affected from being pushed into early retirement benefits.

People with mental illness should be able to keep working. The Greens want to help them return to their jobs. There should be more counseling. Then fewer sick people have to retire early.

The measures are to run through the occupational safety partnership and the Bündnis für Gute Arbeit (Alliance for Good Work). They include better support for returning to the workplace, improved workplace reintegration management (BEM), more appointments for diagnostic consultations, and more therapy places. Information on prevention and against the stigma of mental illness is added. The counseling centers for healthy work are to be kept and their services expanded.

The Greens want more reliable career paths at universities and research institutions. This includes additional permanent positions alongside professorships, more tenure track, and bringing student employees into the states' collective wage agreement.

Many people in academia only have short-term contracts. The Greens want to create more permanent jobs. Students who work at universities should also get better rules. A collective wage agreement should cover them.

Building on the Hamburg Declaration of 2023, work on fair career paths is to continue with the institutions. Ways of funding permanent positions from third-party grants, such as grant pooling, are to be tested. The Greens want to lobby the federal government for a pilot program on tenure track for mid-level academic staff. They also want to examine how student employees can be represented on staff councils.

The Greens want to give more support to (solo) self-employed people and micro-businesses. They should get easier access to funding and public contracts, and the city should pay fees that cover living costs and social security.

Many people in Hamburg work for themselves and alone. The Greens want to help them. They should get funding and city contracts more easily. The city should pay them fair fees. They should be able to live on that.

According to the platform, 86,000 of Hamburg's roughly 100,000 companies have fewer than ten employees, and one in eight working people is (solo) self-employed. At federal level, the party wants to advocate for this group on social insurance and in tax and funding policy. In Hamburg, access to funding and public tenders is to become easier for micro-businesses.

The Greens want to amend Hamburg's public procurement and collective-pay law so that being bound by a collective agreement becomes a criterion for public contracts. Staff at publicly funded organizations and teachers at adult education centers are also to be paid at collectively agreed rates.

The city gives contracts to companies. The Greens want these companies to pay union-agreed wages. A collective agreement sets wages for a whole industry. Companies that break the rule get no more contracts. This should also apply to groups that get city money.

Contractors would have to pay the wages set in the collective agreement relevant to their industry. Where no such agreement exists, the lowest pay grade of the public-sector agreement for the states (TV-L) would serve as the floor, including for publicly financed projects; the program says this also protects solo self-employed people. Violations are to be checked and, in the worst case, punished by exclusion from public contracts. For adult education centers, a continuing education law modeled on Berlin's is planned to enable collectively agreed pay. The Alliance for Good Work is to continue.

The Greens want an inclusive labor market and plan to draw up a strategy for it through 2030 together with those affected. Work in sheltered workshops for people with disabilities is to be better paid and eventually turned into jobs with full social insurance.

People with disabilities should find work more easily. The Greens want to make a plan for this through 2030. The people affected should have a say. Sheltered workshops should pay better. Big companies should pay more if they hire too few disabled people.

Jobs are to be adapted to people's abilities and needs. The project "Berufliche Bildung: dual & inklusiv" run by the Hamburg Institute for Vocational Education is to continue beyond 2025. At the federal level, the party backs a higher compensation levy for large employers that fall well short of the employment requirement, with the money going to inclusive employment. Moving from workshops into the regular labor market is to become easier. The Budget für Arbeit, a permanent wage subsidy, is to grow and its users are to be covered by unemployment insurance; representatives of severely disabled employees are to be strengthened.

The Greens support in principle a 32-hour week over four days and want to test it in a pilot project. In the party's view, shorter hours at the same pay could move more people to take up work or work full time.

The Greens like the idea of a four-day work week. That would be 32 hours of work. They want to test it first in a trial. They will look at health and output, for example. They also want to support flexible working hours.

The pilot is to examine how the model affects productivity, job satisfaction, health, women's employment and the split of unpaid care work between women and men. Employers and employees are to work out together how fewer hours can deliver the same or higher output. As an employer, the city supports working-time corridors set by collective agreement and working-time accounts geared to life phases, as well as models such as job sharing in leadership roles. Remote work should happen only with the consent of both sides; where people regularly work from home, equipment must be provided free of charge.

The Greens want to promote the founding of works councils and staff councils and have obstruction of co-determination prosecuted more firmly. In the party's view, these bodies secure employees' democratic participation, and few workers in Hamburg are represented by them so far.

Works councils speak for the workers in a company. Hamburg has few of them. The Greens want more works councils. Anyone who blocks a works council election should be prosecuted. Prosecutors should get more resources for this.

The party wants to examine which advice and support services can advance co-determination. At the federal level, obstructing co-determination would become an offense prosecuted by the state on its own initiative rather than only on complaint. Hamburg's public prosecutors are to be strengthened for such cases. Employees are to be involved in the shift to a climate-neutral economy. The party also presses for International Labour Organization Convention 190 against violence and harassment at work to be written into German law.

The Greens want to provide more staff for workplace safety inspections and enlarge the city's occupational health service. People with mental illness are to be kept in work through counseling, therapy places and structured return-to-work programs.

The Greens want more safety at work. The city should inspect companies more often. It needs more staff for that. People with mental illness should be able to stay in their jobs. There should be more counseling and therapy for them.

The Occupational Safety Inspection Act requires the states to inspect more businesses by 2026; the staff needed is to be hired in time. A larger occupational health service is meant to shorten waiting times. For people with mental illness, the program lists better workplace reintegration management, more therapy places and information to counter stigma. More counseling is meant to keep those affected from being pushed into early retirement benefits; the counseling centers for healthy work would stay and broaden their services.

The Greens want to develop and widen publicly subsidized employment for the long-term unemployed. At the federal level, the current time limits on this support are to be dropped so that more people can be employed for longer.

Some people are out of work for a long time. There are subsidized jobs for them. The Greens want more of these jobs. Support should be allowed to last longer than five years. This helps more people get back to work.

The program sees the subsidized "social labor market" as a bridge into regular employment and into taking part in society. Support is to be more tailored to the individual, and the accompanying coaching is to get better conditions. Subsidized jobs under Sections 16d and 16i are to increase by helping agencies, districts and city-owned companies set them up. Additional positions are to be created at social service providers in disadvantaged neighborhoods, with new funding models developed for this. The current five-year funding limit is to be overcome by making the scheme permanent.

The Greens want to develop Hamburg into an "inclusion metropolis" where everyone can take part on equal terms. To that end, barriers in public buildings are to be removed quickly and the say of people with disabilities strengthened.

The Greens want people with disabilities to be able to join in everywhere. Public buildings should no longer have barriers. There should be money for this. People with disabilities should have more say. Computer programs should translate texts into easy language.

The district inclusion advisory boards are to receive expense allowances and simpler assistance services by law, taking the ongoing evaluation into account. Women's representatives are to be established in residential facilities. The inclusion office and the arbitration board are to be strengthened as needed, and the state action plan is to be developed further with measures that are easier to measure. The training of people with disabilities as education specialists at universities is to be made permanent and expanded. Artificial intelligence is to help provide texts quickly in easy-to-read language.

The Greens want to protect workers from abroad, including those without papers, from exploitation. In the platform's view, fair working conditions must not depend on a person's origin.

The Greens want to protect workers from abroad better. This includes people without papers. There should be more advice in many languages. The city should check that the minimum wage is paid.

Multilingual, easy-to-reach complaint and counseling services are to be expanded and union structures strengthened. Workers from the EU and from non-EU countries are to be informed about their rights as employees or self-employed people. Occupational safety is to be improved and compliance with minimum wages checked. Special attention goes to women with a migration background working in 24-hour home care.

The Greens want to give better help to heavily indebted people and expand debt counseling. More people are to get free or cheaper advice, and the financial and debt collection industries are to share in the added costs.

The Greens want to help people with large debts better. More people should get free or cheap advice. Banks and debt collectors should help pay for it. Debt collectors are companies that collect unpaid bills.

Payment apps such as Klarna or AfterPay that offer to pay later are to carry a clear warning about the risk of over-indebtedness. The party also wants to end age discrimination in banking. Banks are to be explicitly prohibited from refusing a loan solely because of the applicant's age.