German Labor Min. Nahles tells ECB Draghi to close "His eye on pay packets". Zero euro per hour is the ticket.

Fat Labor Min. Nahles in blue

Ze Germans are ramping it up against Super Mario and hardly anyone is more (dis)qualified for that economics job than that fat German Labor Min. & literate manqué Andrea Nahles (career goal: "Either housewife or chancellor").

Add to this female economics powerhouse a certain D. Scheele, new head of the German Labor Agency, who looks like a rumpled wedding crooner

D. Scheele,
looks like a rumpled wedding crooner,
head of German Labor Agency

and you get a combo of low-wage/slave labor protagonists who even see an hourly pay of € 1 as excessive.

Let's first listen to Dr. Aghi from the ECB who at least talks some sense when he laments the low wage growth as the main stumbling block towards getting the EU out of the slump.

Draghi Is Right to Hold Out for Wage Growth
Europe's recovery hasn't yet translated into higher pay for workers.

and

ECB Draghi: Tells EU leaders wages to blame for low inflation.

The German Labor Ministry wants nothing of this. Sure, employment is high but what kind of employment is that in most cases? Low-paying jobs and temp jobs are the rule. Poverty rate close to 16%.

Wages have grown in Germany but inflation has eaten that away.

Now they want to even start a pilot project in Bremerhaven.

A pilot project to combat long-term unemployment will start in Bremerhaven in early 2018. Instead of simply sitting around at home, Hartz-IV recipients are to help out in companies or to maintain public green spaces without pay. The goal is to integrate them into society through work.

The following reasoning is the real kicker:

Above all parents are to benefit from this by showing their children that they also contribute their part to society. This would have the preventative effect that long-term unemployment is not inherited.

IOW, kids can learn in early age that contribution to society, which is what a job entails, need not be paid. They will inherit the caste of their parents. Once Hartz 4, always Hartz 4 which keeps the export engine humming.

Critique came swift:

"Almost like forced labor"

Claudia Bernhard, labor market policy spokesperson for the left in Bremen, responded to the agency 's proposal in an initial assessment. "The only thing that combats long-term unemployment is jobs," she said. Tobias Helfst from the Bremen Unemployment Association became even clearer. "There is an actual factual device showing its true political face," he says. For him, the project sounds like a humanitarian project. "To employ people as a work force anywhere without paying them decently," he says.