Gross wages are expected to rise by nearly 5% this year and by about 3% in 2012.
In the past decade that contribution has risen by a third, and now eats up 14.3% of gross wages.
That will scupper the government's pledge to bring health and other social-welfare contributions below the equivalent of 40% of gross wages.
As welfare costs have swollen, non-wage labour costs have shot up too, from 36% of gross wages in 1990 to a painful 42% last year.
This, combined with expected increases in health contributions, risks pushing Germany's non-wage labour costs, already among the highest in the world, well over 42% of gross wages.
By raising the ceiling up to which they are taken, the government hopes thereby to stabilise them at 19.3% of gross wages less than they might have reached, but still up from today's 19.1%.
Employers, who normally share with the worker welfare costs amounting to nearly 42% of gross wages, would pay a flat-rate contribution of 25% on jobs up to euro400, reduced to 12% for mini-jobs (cleaners and au pairs, for example) in private households.
Some are now calling for the abolition of the agency and even the scrapping of the federal unemployment-insurance fund (if workers simply saved the 6.5% of gross wages that employers and employees now each contribute, that could give the newly jobless enough of a cushion to get through several months of unemployment).
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The second is that Gross has used the wages and salaries share of national income, not the more correct total compensation, or total labour share, of that national income.
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When the discussion turns to nominal targeting, we can say Nominal Gross Domestic Income Level Targeting (NGDILT) ensures that total Wages and Profits grow at smooth steady rate.
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For instance, Spain, a country which accounts for 12.0% of the euro zone's gross domestic product (GDP), had a relatively large, 5.0% rise in wages.
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