Thomas Handel

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Thomas Handel

Thomas Handel (born August 27, 1953 in Nuremberg ) is a German politician ( Die Linke ) and trade unionist .

Life

Thomas Handel was born in Nuremberg in 1953 and grew up in Fürth. He trained as an electrical engineer at Grundig AG and worked there as a clerk. He became a member of IG Metall and was first elected by his colleagues as a youth representative and later on the works council.

He studied at the Academy for Work at the University of Frankfurt am Main . Handel then became an assistant there for Wolfgang Abendroth, among others . This encounter clearly shaped Handel.

From 1972 Handel was a member of the SPD . With Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's cuts in the social security system at the latest, the rift deepened between the Social Democrats, who wanted their party to be the guardians of the employed and unemployed, and those who pushed the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and society with Agenda 2010 .

In 1979 Georg Benz made him a member of the executive board of IG Metall , which, among other things, sent him to the then important nationwide "coordination committee" of the peace movement. At the height of nuclear retrofitting in the early 80s, the peace movement with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators moved the republic and shook the SPD.

In 1987, Handel in Fürth was elected managing director of IG Metall for the first time and was repeatedly elected until 2012. He became a member of the supervisory board of Grundig AG and an honorary judge at the regional labor court. He was a strike leader in several collective bargaining rounds in the metal and electrical industry. In 1992 he and others founded the trade union educational institute "biko" and became its managing director.

In March 2004, Handel and others drafted an appeal for the establishment of the “Labor and Social Justice Initiative”. The initiative saw itself as the opposite of the "agenda" course of the SPD leadership.

In June 2004, Handel, like the other authors of the appeal, was therefore excluded from the SPD without a hearing.

From this initiative, in January 2005, the party “Labor & Social Justice - The Alternative Choice”, or WASG for short, emerged. Thomas Handel was one of the four executive board members and federal treasurer of the WASG, which in 2007 merged with the PDS to form the “Die Linke” party.

Since 2009 Thomas Handel was a member of the group of the united left in the European Parliament and coordinator of the group in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and as a deputy member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. The former full-time trade unionist from Franconia is primarily responsible for economic and employment policy. In the 2014 European elections, Thomas Handel was the second male top candidate on the left's European list.

In 2014 he was selected by his group to take over the only committee chair he was entitled to in the European Parliament and headed the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs until the 2019 European elections. He was also a deputy member of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee and a member of the delegation to the Southeast Asian countries and ASEAN.

Handel withdrew his candidacy for the 2019 European elections .

Handel is deputy chairman of the " Rosa Luxemburg Foundation ". Thomas Handel writes frequently in national and international publications and is the author and editor of several papers and books.

Fonts

  • with Axel Trost : From the Social State Party to the New Left Party - A History of the Elective Work and Social Justice (WASG) , VSA-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-89965-712-8 .
  • with Klaus Ernst and Katja Zimmermann (eds.): What was? What remains? Paths to the WASG, paths to DIE LINKE VSA Verlag, ISBN 978-3-89965-522-3 .
  • with Axel Troost (ed.): Working time development in Europe , with texts by Steffen Lehndorff, Alexandra Wagner, Christine Franz, Axel Troost, Thomas Händel, Bildungskooperation Mittelfranken e. V.
  • with Cornelia Ernst , Jürgen Klute, Martina Michels , Helmut Scholz, Gabriele Zimmer (Eds.): Europa.Besser.Links - Das Buch zur Wahl , An EBook by GUE / NGL.
  • with Klaus Dörre, Frank Puskarev, Werner Zipperer: Precarisation in Europe , Educational Cooperation Middle Franconia, Wolfgang Abendroth Foundation Society, 90762 Fürth
  • with Franz Garnreiter Werner Zipperer: What actually is neoliberal? Wolfgang Abendroth Foundation Society Fürth & .biko Middle Franconia

literature

  • Robert Lorenz : "Cold Fusion" technician. The leadership of the Left Party. In: Tim Spier et al. (Ed.): Die Linkspartei. A contemporary idea or an alliance without a future? VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-14941-7 , pp. 275–323.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Handel: On our own behalf: Rejection of the renewed candidacy. May 11, 2018, accessed June 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Handel, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade unionists and politicians (Die Linke), MEP
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg