Introduction of Personnel Service Agencies in Germany (A ressource based SWOT-Analysis) (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: A+ (1,0), University of Lincoln (Commerce Department), course: Business Management, language: English, abstract: It started on 06th of February 2002 with headlines in all major newspapers in Germany.
The German Federal Audit Office demanded the highly centralized Federal
Agency for Labour (Bundesanstalt für Arbeit) in Nuremburg revise their statistics
(Anonymous, 2002a; Anonymous 2002c; Anonymous, 2002d; Baulig C. et. al., 2002).
According to the audit office report 70 per cent or 2.7 million of the successes in the
mediation of employment were faked (Kogelfranz, 2002). The agency, with its 90,000
employees, turned out to be one of the most inefficient but most expensive agencies
of that kind in Europe. After a couple of days the president of the agency Bernhard
Jagoda resigned under the pressure of the federal government and Chancellor
Schröder. His successor Florian Gerster was told to reform the mammoth-agency.
Meanwhile the German government realized that the whole system of labour mediation
had become both too inefficient and too costly. So, among other things Chancellor
Schröder hired Dr. Peter Hartz to head a commission which should work out solutions
for a new German labour market model. The former Volkswagen (VW) executive
and his commission rolled out a concept of 13 modules of innovation (see Figure 1)
in July 2002. This concept called "Modern Services on the labour market" followed
the premise of enabling the unemployed to participate actively in their attempt to get
a new job (Hartz-Commission, 2002b, p.19). That means, on the one hand, to lower
barriers for people who like to show self initiative but were blocked by complicated
labour and tax laws. On the other hand self initiative should become a duty and
unemployed people who do not show enough commitment in their struggle for a new job will have to face dole-cuts. Also in order to set incentives for companies to hire
from the ranks of the unemployed, the commission suggested removing some sacred
cows of employee protection. [...]