GERMANY: According to a recent IG Metall press release, the German metalworkers' union president, Klaus Zwickel, has appealed to German companies to end their "disgraceful haggering" with regard to their obligation to pay 5 billion German marks into the fund which has been created for paying compensation to the surviving slave labourers employed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
While the German government has fully paid its part into the fund, German industry has only raised half of its share up to now. Zwickel is asking them to live up to their responsibility. He says that in the headquarters of the country's industry, a spirit of "narrow-minded baseness" seems to prevail, which ignores the devastating consequences that a failure of this initiative will inevitably have, such as prooving to the extreme right-wing minority that they have allies in the upper echelons of German capital.