Chancellor Merkel (CDU), CSU president Horst Seehofer and SPD president Sigmar Gabriel have agreed on paying Germany’s workers a minimum hourly wage of €8.50. The new regulation would benefit four million people, but the exact details of the agreement have not been released, yet. One of the hot topics that still remains unclear is the minimum age. Employers would rather not see that the minimum age should be too low. Their argument is that this would risk the training of new, young employees since they would be too expensive. Their suggestion is to allow for certain exceptions to be made. Advocates of a low minimum age, however, claimed that exceptions would just lead to more dumping practices, i.e. large companies paying very low salaries and undercutting the competition unfairly.

However, the agreement states that the minimum wage will apply to all industries. Sigmar Gabriel argues that this will put an end to wage dumping practices and ultimately benefit all parties involved.