With a spoon and spatula in hand, Zaid, a 23-year-old Iraqi refugee, lifted the lid on a large pot filled with goulash and potatoes as he began his shift.
From 6:30pm to 8pm, he is employed to dish out dinner to 152 other Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Moldovan refugees in a sports hall, which had been turned into an emergency shelter for newcomers in Berlin.
Zaid is one of thousands of refugees who have taken on tasks ranging from repairing bicycles to pruning plants to cleaning sidewalks for pay of a little more than one euro (US$1.10) per hour.
The so-called “one-euro jobs” have been touted as a springboard for the newcomers into Germany’s job market, but experts remain skeptical about their effectiveness.
At the sports gym, Zaid tried to explain to the skeptical faces crowded in front of him what went into the beef stew that he described as “so German.”
For the work that includes setting the table, cutting bread, serving food and then cleaning up, he is paid 1.05 euros per hour.
Restricted to working no more than 20 hours a week, Zaid gets a monthly income of 84 euros at best, a small extra on top of the 143 euros he receives as pocket money, while he waits for the official decision on his asylum application.
His monthly intake might be a tiny fraction of an average German wage, but Zaid takes on his job with a big smile.
“It allows me to have contact with the German volunteers who come here to distribute meals, and gives me a chance to speak the language,” said Zaid, who fled the Iraqi city of Hilla, about 100km south of Baghdad, along with his father and sister six months ago.
“I do not have to stand around in the center not knowing what to do,” Zaid added.
With authorities often taking weeks, if not months, to process asylum applications, many refugees are bored out of their minds, as they are not allowed to take on regular employment during that time.
To get around the problem, authorities have decided to make use of the one-euro job solution.
Conceived a decade ago with the aim of nudging the long-term unemployed back to work, it is now being used to help integrate a record influx of refugees, which topped 1.1 million last year.
Berlin currently employs 3,925 refugees, who are lodged in 75 centers, and wants to widen the offer to associations that offer public services, such as charities helping the homeless or rehabilitative shelters for alcoholics.
In Bavaria, the main gateway for thousands of refugees in southern Germany, 9,000 refugees have taken up such jobs.
The city of Hannover also offers newcomers the possibility of working in bicycle repair, or sorting donated clothes, or accompanying kindergarten children in exchange for German language classes.
German Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Andrea Nahles has promised to create 100,000 such posts for refugees, describing them as a “trampoline” into the job market.
“In the short term, it makes sense, because the refugees cannot otherwise work,” said Ronald Bachmann, an economist at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.
“Having them at work also sends a good political signal,” he said, as anti-migrant populism surges in tandem with Germany’s record refugee influx.
Nevertheless, Bachmann added that the one-euro jobs have not proven particularly successful in their original task of getting the long-term unemployed back to work.
“It was very, very rare that they helped to bring them back to a job market, as one learns very little from such jobs,” Bachmann said.
Confederation of German Trade Unions president Reiner Hoffmann has also spoken out against placing refugees in such jobs, as he believes that Germany needs a far more ambitious program to integrate the newcomers into the economy.
Holger Schaefer of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research also had harsh words for the program, saying: “We are, in fact, subsidizing the exclusion of refugees from the job market.”
However, Zaid has no intention of pursuing his budding career in the restaurant business.
He has just signed up for a class in a Berlin high school, helping him to resume his studies in information technology, which were abruptly halted in Iraq.
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