“If something like that happened in the private sector,” says Hendrik Schödel, “then the employer would have quite a problem.” Schödel, chairman of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association in Upper Franconia (BLLV), is certainly right. But even with the Free State as your employer, it is no better to start a job in September and still not have a salary in your account in April of the following year. At least that’s what happened to some teachers.
The CSU member of the state parliament, Holger Dremel, calls the Free State of Bavaria a “reliable employer” – although it has not proven to be that reliable. A significant proportion of the teachers and educational assistants affected were hired as part of the “build bridges together” program in order to catch up on backlogs through homeschooling. According to the Ministry of Culture, the number of such support staff “also increased significantly due to the corona”. Which led to the delays in salary payments, the administrations were overwhelmed with processing the applications.
Sabine Gärtner (name changed) also experienced this. She works as an employed – i.e. not a civil servant – teacher at a school near Aschaffenburg. In September she took up her duties as a fifth grade teacher and received her first full salary on December 30th. Before that, she was put off with down payments that by far did not replace the salary to which she was entitled. “Without my parents I would have been screwed,” says Gärtner. When she hears that someone speaks of a “reliable employer” against this background, she “can only laugh”.
As one who has regularly received a full salary at least since the end of 2021, Gärtner has done relatively well; according to BLLV Unterfranken, some people still don’t have their money.
The Ministry of Education is aware of the problem, it can be “regularly reported on the status of the transaction,” it said when asked. Currently, the “status of the settlement” is this: the “predominant majority” of the contract documents submitted on time “led to a settlement and, as a result, to a payment”.
The fact that it all took so long is due to the “mass of employment contracts to be drawn up at the beginning of the school year”, which “represented a major challenge” for personnel administration, which “can only be mastered gradually”.
How difficult and time-consuming it is to process the flood of paper – according to the BLLV in September there were a good 850 applications in a short time in Central Franconia – is recognized by the Bavarian teachers’ associations. “It’s not like the employees in the administration are twiddling their thumbs,” says Markus Erlinger, BLLV board member in Middle Franconia. But nevertheless, complains Thomas Gehring from the Green Party, it is “an intolerable situation”. For Hendrik Schödel from the BLLV in Upper Franconia, all of this is, to put it politely, not good advertising for the Free State as an employer.
Just like the Greens, who failed with a corresponding motion in the Public Service Committee due to the lack of support from the CSU and Free Voters (FW), Schödel is calling for structural reforms. He expects the “de-bureaucratization of forms and applications”, which cannot be filled out digitally; and “the strengthening of the internal administration”, among other things, so-called reappointment blocks are responsible for the fact that there are no successors for retiring workers for months. And Schödel would like “contracts with good teachers to be extended in good time” in order to prevent a complete reprocessing of their applications from contributing to the traffic jam.
CSU and FW, on the other hand, see the topic as “a sham discussion,” said CSU man Dremel in the committee. There is no question that it is important “that the Free State pays its employees on time”. But the pandemic was “a special situation”. “I think we’re in a good position there.”
However, the teachers’ associations and the Greens already see the next unplanned payment barrier for teachers. Namely when new teachers submit their applications for the schooling of children who have fled Ukraine. “We have to fear that the same thing will happen again,” says Markus Erlinger.
The number of applications will probably remain lower this time anyway – and not just because there are fewer children to be schooled. Many educators have had bad experiences, says Erlinger. In the state parliament committee, the Green Gehring reported on pensioners who stepped in for the catch-up program, but “do not want to do the bureaucratic act again”.
According to its own statements, the Ministry of Education is working on permanent improvements. In the short term, those affected would have received advance payments, and they had “already checked the necessary procedural steps and documents for streamlining and adjusted them accordingly”. Means: The scope of the forms has been reduced, and the administrative staff have also been “sensitized” to certain points in order to make progress more efficiently. In addition, funds were made available for the pandemic-related additional programs “to increase human resources” for 2021, 2022 and 2023 “to hire additional staff to cope with peak workloads”.
Anyway, that sounds promising.