A German regional justice minister is proposing fitting long-term unemployed people with electronic tags in order to help them ”get back into an ordered daily routine”.
Christean Wagner, a Christian Democrat (CDU) minister in the central state of Hesse, also compares people out of work for a number of years with recovering drug addicts.
”An electronic tag offers the long-term unemployed and drug addicts undergoing treatment the chance to get back into an ordered daily routine and find a job or get some training,” Wagner said.
He originally made the controversial suggestion to tackle Germany’s unemployment figures of around five million in March, but it went almost unnoticed.
The story re-surfaced on Thursday in Germany’s top-selling newspaper Bild after local citizens’ associations expressed outrage at the proposal.
On his website, Wagner adds: ”Many of them have got out of the habit of following normal hours and so are compromising their chances of working or getting training.
”Keeping an eye on them with an electronic tag could really them to help themselves.”
The idea has drawn condemnation from the ruling coalition of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens.
An SPD expert on labour issues, Peter Dressen, said it was ”a mad idea”.
Werner Schulz, who represents the Greens on economic issues, described the proposal as ”revolting”.
The Hesse regional government has tried to distance itself from Wagner’s suggestion, but the proposal could still be seen on the state’s website on Thursday. – Sapa-AFP