Status: 01/25/2023 09:10 a.m
From the point of view of the Federal Government Commissioner for East Germany, Schneider, there are too few management positions in federal authorities held by East Germans. According to statistics, they hold just under 14 percent of top positions.
Even more than 30 years after reunification, too few citizens from East Germany occupy management positions in German federal authorities. This criticism was voiced by the Federal Government’s Eastern Commissioner, Carsten Schneider. The basis is a statistic collected for the first time on the staffing in the executive floors of the authorities concerned.
As the newspapers of the Funke media group report, more than 3,600 positions in 93 federal agencies were examined for the statistics. These include the Federal Government, the Bundestag, the Office of the Federal President, the Bundesrat and the Federal Constitutional Court as well as all federal courts.
The result: Only 13.9 percent of all management positions are occupied by employees who come from one of the new federal states. If you only take the five eastern German states without Berlin as places of birth, the figure is only 7.4 percent. And that despite the fact that the proportion of East Germans in the total population of the Federal Republic is around 20 percent.
“Unconscious discrimination against people from the East”
In the “higher management levels” in particular, “the under-representation is particularly pronounced,” according to the report by the Eastern Commissioner Schneider, which will be a topic in the federal cabinet during the day. The proportion of East Germans in the management levels is 6.8 percent, excluding Berlin 4.5 percent.
Schneider warned of a “kind of unconscious discrimination against people from the East” and emphasized: “Especially for the older generations in the East there was little access to highly paid positions in the public service at federal and state level, since after the reunification it was mainly young West Germans who occupied positions and continue to do so to this day.”
Schneider advocates self-commitment by the authorities
The Eastern Commissioner spoke of a “still unsolved task” that the federal government must take on. Not only in politics and administration, but also in business, culture, science, the judiciary and the media, more citizens from East Germany should be given leadership positions. “This is crucial for social cohesion and the stability of our democracy,” emphasized the SPD politician. As the report states, many people from East Germany still feel like “second-class citizens” and “underrepresented in elites”.
However, Schneider advises against a quota in order to achieve more diversity in federal authorities, in which East Germans are also sufficiently represented. Instead, data on places of birth should first be collected more systematically and federal authorities should work with voluntary commitments. Selection committees should be made up of more diverse staff, managers should be specifically prepared for their tasks and networks should be promoted.