Germans seek big increase in population

Press, 19 April 1985, Page 12

Germans seek big increase in population

From

TONY CATTERALL,

in Bonn

With about 100,000 more people dying every year than are being born in West Germany, the nation is slowly dying out. Yet any attempt to start a “family policy,” encouraging the birUi of more children, runs up against the Nazi past, in which the production of children was seen as a woman’s main task in life. The way round it, in a resolution recently adopted by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats, is to see putting up the birthrate as “a new partnership between men and women.” Under the policy, either a mother or a father would be able to take a year off normal work to care for a child full-time. The pay would be around $2OO a month for the year off and the right to return to the original job would be guaranteed. “Without the guarantee of a job to go back to, women find themselves faced with the choice of either child or work,” argues the C.D.U. general secretary, Heiner Geissler, who is also Minister for Youth, Family, and Health. In a separate Government proposal, employers are to be given the right to take on new staff for a fixed contract to cover the gap. At the end of it the employee would have no right of appeal against dismissal. The scheme has run into strong opposition. Women who fear they will be “protected out of the chance to work,” argue that employers would simply refuse to take on women if they had to allow them a year off.

Small businessmen said it would make their life difficult, and the traditionalists feared it would lead to the end of “the woman who is happy to be no more than a mother and housewife.” After a debate at the C.D.U. conference lasting almost an entire day, and well into the night, the conference agreed — with only one vote against — on a slightly watered-down compromise. A parent who takes a year off to raise a child would have a guaranteed job waiting, but not necessarily “in the same room and on the same chair” as previously. As a sop to the traditionalists, the party executive’s motion on achieving equal rights between men and women in everyday life by the year 2000 was also amended to include the sentence that the role of mother and father "is not arbitrarily exchangeable.” Getting the resolution through conference was one matter. Enacting a law will be another, as the junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats, have already decided that such a job guarantee “has no place in the free market economy..” Although the opposition Social Democrats have welcomed the measure in principle, they have their doubts as to whether it will work in practice. One legal expert says the proposed short term contracts could be held over the head of women as a threat: give up the idea of children, and your contract will be renewed. Copyright — London Observer Service.