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fromClaus-Jürgen Göpfert
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The Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) in Wiesbaden is threatened with bankruptcy. 420 employees should forego Christmas bonuses and corona allowances.
The Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) in Wiesbaden is in a precarious financial situation. The board of directors has informed the 420 employees that neither the Christmas bonus nor the corona allowance now made possible by law should be paid out. Both exceed the financial possibilities of the welfare organization, as the chairman of the board Wolfgang Hessenauer said in an interview with the FR: “We have a problem.”
The AWO Wiesbaden could not support the collective wage increase in the nursing professions agreed on April 1st. When asked whether the AWO was threatened with bankruptcy in the state capital, he replied: “That could be because we may not be able to pay the Christmas bonus.”
The 78-year-old from Hessenau, who used to be the head of social affairs in Wiesbaden, calculated that the Christmas bonus alone would add up to 900,000 euros. For the one-time corona allowance, a further 160,000 euros would be due. The AWO top has therefore started exploratory talks with the service union Verdi about an “emergency collective agreement”. In this paper, Verdi should agree that the Christmas bonus will initially be deferred and then paid out later. In principle, employees would have to forego the corona allowance. According to Hessenauer, the “emergency collective agreement” only exists if it is accepted by both the employees and the Verdi federal board.
The social democrat Hessenauer was elected as the new chairman of the AWO Wiesbaden board at an extraordinary general meeting in January 2020, at his side is the former head of the Wiesbaden office for social work, Franz Betz.
Hessenauer said that you need time “to put the chaos in order” that the former managing director Hannelore Richter had left behind. Richter was at the head of the AWO district association in Wiesbaden, while her husband Jürgen led the Frankfurt district association for a long time. The Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office has been investigating former leading AWO officials on suspicion of fraud and breach of trust since autumn 2019.
Hessenauer drew a very critical picture of the situation of the Wiesbaden district association. For a long time now, the fees that are being paid in the AWO nursing homes in Wiesbaden have no longer covered costs. The tariffs have not been increased for 15 years. “They should actually be 40 percent higher.” Such a sudden jump in costs is of course unreasonable. “We need a transitional period for this.” In the family meeting places, too, tariffs need to be increased. “The daycare centers, on the other hand, are doing well.”
According to Hessenauer, the AWO Wiesbaden under Hannelore Richter’s leadership made a loss of two million euros in the 2018 financial year alone. A deficit is also expected for 2019.
The Wiesbaden lawyer Bernhard Lorenz, who represents the Richter couple, presented the situation completely differently. Hannelore Richter had been in the black for decades for the workers’ welfare in Wiesbaden and had “left the management at the end of 2019 with millions in income”. During the period in which she was active, she expanded the district association from 85 employees to “more than 500 employees” and increased sales from three million euros to more than 30 million euros.
The new leadership, on the other hand, is driving “the association against the wall”, they have lost sight of the facilities and their income, “they sit in the Nero Valley and eat files instead of doing management by walking”.
The old leadership, emphasizes Lorenz, has passed the responsibility on to the next generation: “Nobody has left the dust.”
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