Gerhard Bosch, Karen Jaehrling and Claudia Weinkopf DIREKT 37/ 2015 STATUTORY MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE – CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION AT A GLANCE With the statutory minimum wage of€ 8.50 per hour introduced from January 2015 Germany now has a binding wage floor aimed at preventing wage dumping and bolstering fairness in the labour market. To realise that aim, the minimum wage must also be effectively implemented and enforced in practice. Experiences from the United Kingdom, where a minimum wage was introduced as early as 1999, show that this is a protracted process in which problems and regulatory loopholes have to be dealt with by means of legal clarifications, practical guidance and even new implementation strategies. Since 1 January 2015 a minimum wage of€ 8.50 per hour has applied to dependent employees. Despite many warnings of, in some instances, heavy job losses due to the introduction of the minimum wage, to date there has been no sign of such negative effects. The large number of calls to the hotlines of the German Trade Union Confederation(DGB) and the Federal Ministry of Labour (BMAS), as well as numerous press reports on attempts by em­ployers to thwart calls for a minimum wage in one way or another, indicate that in practice the minimum wage has yet to be imple­mented and enforced effectively. At the same time, during the first months there were still discussions at the political level concerning the regulatory details, in particular the obligation to keep a record of working time. In other countries with a statutory minimum wage, such as the United Kingdom, similar topics have been discussed as in Germany. In this contribution we examine what suggestions and conclusions can be drawn from the British experiences for effective implementation and enforcement of the statutory minimum wage in Germany. TRANSPARENCY AND CLARITY Only if employees are aware of the level of the minimum wage are they able to demand it in practice. To that end, employees and companies must be informed of the level of the minimum wage and must know to whom it applies. In Germany there are exemptions for apprentices, people under 18 years of age, volun­teer workers, family members helping out in a business and previously long-term unemployed persons for the first six months of new employment. Interns are not entitled to the minimum wage only if theirs is a mandatory internship within the frame­work of training(school, university) or the internship is only for up to three months. Employees and firms also need to know which wage components may be taken into account in calculating the minimum wage entitlement. On this point the legal regulations in Germany leave a number of matters open. Thus some contro­versial issues have already had to be clarified by the courts – for example, the fact that holiday pay may not be taken into account in minimum wage calculations. 1 Furthermore, on-call time must also be remunerated with the minimum wage. In the United Kingdom, too, the National Minimum Wage Act of 1998 contains numerous regulatory loopholes that have been closed only over the course of time. Considerable use has been made of ordinances for this purpose. For example, with the National Minimum Wage Regulations of 1999 the scope and pre­cise methods of calculation were laid down – for instance, what working time is to be remunerated with the minimum wage, what allowances may be included and whether and to what extent accommodation costs may be deducted. Over the years numerous detailed regulations have been added or amended. In order to enhance the transparency of the current provisions the National Minimum Wage Regulations of 2015 were published recently to >