Pay packet

Wage packet of the miner Schürer 14 from the inflation period . Payout on September 29th: 300 million Reichsmarks.

Salary bag of a German civil servant, August 1940

The wage packet (for workers ; for employees : salary bag ) is a term that is mostly only used metaphorically today for the regular cash payment of the salary .

history

For a long time, employees were rewarded with cash payments on payday . The wages were paid in cash at the end of the month, weekly or bi-weekly. For security reasons, the cash was packed in a paper bag, on which the exact pay slip (wage slip ) was often printed with gross wages, deductions and net wages. This enabled the recipient to check the content directly by counting.

FRG

Since 1957, this cash payment in the form of wages and salaries has been suppressed in the Federal Republic of Germany , because more and more companies and local governments started to transfer wages and salaries to current accounts .

GDR

In the GDR there was cash payment in the wage packet until the beginning of the 1980s.

Second wage packet

In the GDR, state subsidies were referred to as the “second wage packet”. These included capped rents, free medical care, kindergartens, child benefits and rising pensions; but also subsidized staple foods.

End of the cash payment of wages and salaries

Both the simpler cashless payment transactions and security considerations led to the end of the old wage packet. Another disadvantage was that the money supply M0 was greatly inflated by increasing the currency in circulation on pay days.

One last holdover from the cash payout is the account management fee, which is reimbursed to employees.

As a result, the wage packet has only survived as a slang term that metaphorically describes the amount of income available to the employee. For example, whoever says: "There is less and less in the pay packet!" expresses that his income is getting smaller and smaller.

Exceptions

Some workers are still paid in cash today. Ordinary envelopes are used for this; For data protection reasons, the pay slip is enclosed in the envelope and is no longer noted on the outside.

literature

• Karl Weisser: Cashless wage and salary payments (=  reference books for the economy ). Gabler, 1959, ISBN 978-3-663-12761-1 , Impact of cashless wage and salary payments, p. 47–66 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-663-13789-4_4 ( preview [accessed on July 12, 2015] click on “Look inside”).

Web links

Commons : Pay packet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: wage packet  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• From the pay packet to the payroll account. In: svn.de. Retrieved July 12, 2015 . 

Individual evidence

1. ^ DEFA Foundation - Films. In: defa.de. Retrieved July 12, 2015 . 
2. ^ The GDR in the seventies . Federal Agency for Civic Education, April 5, 2002
3. ^ Mathias Judt: GDR history in documents: Resolutions, reports, internal materials and everyday testimonies , 1997, p. 161
4. ↑ Co-determination / participation. 1.2.4 Payment of wages (No. 4). Haufe, accessed July 12, 2015 .