Occupational Safety and Health Control Act - Irresponsible Legislation
For months now, meat industry companies have been prepared to forego work contracts. The overwhelming majority will succeed in producing only with permanent employees from January 01, 2021. The ban on temporary work will, however, lead to problems, especially in the production of seasonal meat products. What is even more dramatic, however, is the fact that the envisaged law contains numerous indefinite terms and formulations that do not allow companies to convert in a clearly legally compliant manner. And that even in the few days between Christmas and New Year - how is that supposed to work?
Small businesses with up to 49 employees should be exempt from the new regulations. It is not clear from the law which staff has to be taken into account and which type of company associations have to be added together. For example, butcher's cooperatives in the network cannot know whether they are to be invested jointly or individually and according to which criteria this would have to be decided.
For larger companies and companies that work together in cooperation, the term “overarching organization” is introduced and it is stipulated that such an “overarching organization” may only be managed by a single owner. That would be the AUS for any kind of work-sharing, cooperative collaboration between meat companies, e.g. in branded meat programs, with specialty companies or in the form of wage slaughtering. This primarily affects the regional slaughterhouses that can only exist with these partnerships. Government circles say that such “sensible” collaborations should not be covered by the law. But that's not in the law and who decides on sensible and senseless?
These fundamental weaknesses in the draft law are not eliminated by the amendment tabled recently by the government factions, but rather made worse. If this law were to be crammed through shortly before Christmas without further discussion and came into force on January 01st, this would be a bottomless irresponsibility of the German Bundestag towards the companies and entrepreneurs disciplined by the law, who do not know how to behave in accordance with the law , and even if they did, they would not have time to fully implement the new legal situation.
Against this background, the VDF has appealed in the attached letter to the head of the Federal Chancellery, the members of the relevant committees in the German Bundestag and the chairmen of the CDU / CSU parliamentary groups to only pass the proposed Occupational Safety and Health Control Act with precise formulations that give the companies and the control authorities legal certainty . In addition, the date of entry into force must be chosen so that the companies have a reasonable period of time to be able to implement the new regulations.
