Inge Hannemann

Life

Hannemann trained as a forwarding merchant, network administrator and placement officer. Sie studierte Journalismus, ist Mitglied von Ver.di, war fünf Jahre Mitglied bei den Jusos She studied journalism, is a member of the labour union Ver.di and advocates for an unconditional basic income. She is involved in local politics in Hamburg. Although not being a member of the party Die Linke, she was voted in the district assembly Hamburg Altona in May 2014. During the Hamburg parliament elections she ran for Die Linke on place 13 of the party list. With 7570 direct votes, she secured a mandate for the 21st Hamburg parliament. In Hamburg parliament she's part of the petitions committee. She is the spokesperson for labour market policy for the parliamentary group of Die Linke.

Hannemann is married and has a daughter.

Controversy on the sanctions practice

Since 2005, Hannemann works for the Jobcenter Hamburg-Altona. According to media articles, she refused to issue sanctions in case of rule violations for several months. Hannemann denies those accusations and claims to have only withdrawn sanctions in individual, justified cases. Whether to issue a sanction or not lies within the discretion of the case worker. Furthermore, Hannemann criticised the way case workers at the Jobcenter deal with recipients of benefits of Arbeitslosengeld II and guidelines in this regard. For those reasons, she was exempted from work at the JobCenter in 2013 and was banned from entering the premises. Hannemann was offered a position in the district office of Eimsbüttel that she denied. Indead she tried to be re-employed as placement officer by the Jocenter. Her emergency appeal was rejected by the labour court on July 30, 2013.

The main proceedings were originally scheduled for July 11, 2014 but the court cancelled the day before because the city Hamburg revoked their secondment to the Jobcenter to the employ her in a different position. Hannemann's attempts to remove the revokation of the secondment to the Jobcenter were unsuccessful. In December 2014 Hannemann agreed to a settlement and works for the integration office since.

More than 16000 people demanded her employer in an online-petition to withdraw the disciplinary actions against Hannemann.

Hannemann was the first employee of a German Jobcenter to publicly criticise the labour market policy of Agenda 2010. She claimed in her Altona-Blog and many presentations and interviews that "support and demand" (Fördern und Fordern) - the proclaimed goal of the Hartz-concept gave way to technocratic specifications long ago. Hartz IV does not aim at offering a perspective to unemployed people to reenter the labour market but instead force them out of receiving benefits through sanctions. The federal labour agency declared during the labour court trial that the abuse described by Hannemann doesn't exist and that she was endangering thousands of Jobcenter employees. Instead she simply chose the wrong job. Hannemann objected and claimed to be able to prove her allegation with documents.

On November 20, 2013 Hannemann's petition "Arbeitslosengeld II - Abschafffung der Sanktionen und Leistungseinschränkungen (SGB II und SGB XII)" (unemployment benefits II - abolishment of the sanctions and benefit restrictions) was published on the petition website of the German federal parliament. 50.000 signatures were necessary to reach the quorum. This goal was reached already on December 16, 2013. On March 17, 2014, the petition was dealt with in a public session of the petition committee of the German federal parliament.