German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/28, pp. 2470-2471.
Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
Today we finally speak of the nursing bonus which now however many nursing staff unfortunately need perceive as an insult. The nursing bonus comes of course precisely at that point in time at which thousands of employees in hospitals, in the nursing area, are working in an occupational condition of vacancy. Vacant because the state brutally intervenes in the right of self-determination of these workers.
Just now thousands of non-vaccinated co-workers must be reported by their employers to health officials. Here it is irrelevant whether these people in past years have performed self-sacrificing action for patients and for that were recently applauded from the gallery. The personal decision to not let themselves be vaccinated has plainly not been made by many of these with a guarantee. Nevertheless, they often witness among the patients that the risks and uses of these injections are in striking disparity.
Yet now to the nursing bonus, which is about giving back something to people for a performance which they put forward whole-heartedly and with great energy. What requires months to formulate reads like a math exam calculation. I may go briefly into the details.
550 euros shall be alloted to co-workers who work crucially in the direct nursing and attendance of those requiring care. All additional co-workers who are active at the facility receive only 370 euros. This can be, for example, employees in administration, the kitchen or garden and groundskeeping, if they – verbatim – “have been active at least 25 percent of their work time, daily-structured, active attending or caring, in common with those requiring care.”
I ask myself: Who thinks up such numbers? How does the facility administration determine who in garden and groundskeeping spends 25 percent of their work time in common with those requiring care in daily-structured, etc., or not? Does it get more complicated? In every election campaign, one speaks of a necessary deconstruction of bureaucracy. Yet what results when ministerial officials write a law? Almost always a complicated and bureaucratic monster.
Is the government not in a position to formulate a law, for example, of this kind: “The employees who crucially work in the direct care and attendance of patients receive for their activity a tax- and duty-free bonus of 2,500 euros. All other employees who do not work directly with patients or those requiring care, yet who are in any case needed for the maintenance of the facility, receive this bonus pro rata”?
While the armaments industry will now be promoted with 100 billion euros, the Federal Government insults all those who have sacrificed themselves in service to people. Thus does one certainly not increase the attractiveness of the nursing vocation and obviate the nursing emergency. I therefore demand a nursing bonus which is correspondingly worthy of its recipients.
All must receive this bonus and not just those who have worked in a hospital in which in one year more than ten patients infected with the Corona virus have been treated, and these were at times ventilated more than 48 hours – thus it is in the same draft law. What distinguishes one nursing staff which has worked in a hospital in which only nine patients within twelve months were ventilated more than 48 hours from a nursing staff which has worked in a hospital with eleven ventilated patients?
Can this government, which constantly speaks of justice, not simply make an uncomplicated law which thinks of the co-workers? Yet here apparently I am thinking too pragmatically, too close to people. Therefore, please make out of this theoretically well meant law a law good in practice! Then we will with joy vote in favor.
I thank you for your attention.
[trans: tem]
