ZDF journalist Birte Meier, who worked for the magazine for a long time frontal 21 was working and sued her broadcaster for wage inequality has a new job. She switches to RTL. Together with Manka Heise and Christian Esser, also from the ZDF magazine frontal 21 come, she will set up an “investigative unit” in Berlin from the summer, as the broadcaster RTL announced on Monday. Stephan Schmitter, the managing director of RTL News, counts the three newcomers among “the best in their profession”.
On the one hand, the personnel stands for the new course of the broadcaster RTL. He has been poaching well-known journalists from public broadcasters for some time, a year ago ARDdaily topics-Moderatorin Pinar Atalay switched to the media group RTL Germany. Now three investigative journalists are changing frontal 21-Team to the Cologne station. The investigative formats of the broadcaster should benefit from this, but also the magazine starwhich is now part of RTL and is also currently being reorganized.
On the other hand, the personnel also stands for a piece of legal history. In 2015, the reporter sued ZDF for wage inequality after discovering that she was earning less than the men she worked with. The process went through several instances, the lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds, among other things, that Meier was a freelancer and her salary was not comparable to that of permanent employees. But Meier also achieved a victory that regarded as groundbreaking in employment law will: She fought for the right, even as a freelancer, to get information about the salaries of her male colleagues under the Pay Transparency Act. The law actually only provided for this for permanent employees.
Birte Meier, who recently produced documentaries at ZDF, is to work cross-media for the RTL broadcaster and, as the editor-in-chief of the star formulated, “set relevant topics that Germany talks about”. Meier herself wrote on Twitter that she was looking forward to “researching big investigative stories” with her “favorite colleagues”.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit on wage inequality continues. The court dismissed Meier’s lawsuit because she could not prove that she was paid less because of her gender, and the appeal was not allowed either. On the other hand, Meier first filed a non-admission complaint and, after this was rejected, filed a constitutional complaint before the Federal Constitutional Court. This has not yet been decided.