In the middle of the Christmas business, an initiative from the CDU causes a stir. The idea: a fee for parcels that online retailers send to their customers. This is intended to finance a “city center fund” that will benefit stationary retail. This has been particularly hard hit by the corona pandemic with the shop closings. The coalition partner SPD supports the proposal. The FDP and especially the retail sector itself are not very enthusiastic.

“Pact for lively inner cities” The position paper “Pact for lively inner cities” from the CDU / CSU parliamentary group comes from the deputy chairman Andreas Jung and the local political spokesman Christian Haase. They advocate introducing a package fee for online trading, “the amount of which is proportional to the order value”.

“The fee is collected from and from the online retailer With the income from this, the online trade will share in the costs of communal infrastructures used by it “, it says in the list of demands, which is available to the German press agency. Previously, the Welt am Sonntag reported about it.

Jung and Haase justify the suggested levy, for which they do not give any specific figures, with the “imbalance compared to the stationary retail trade”, which could be eliminated as a result. The traders with the shops in the streets are already contributing significantly to the municipal budget with their taxes. The two CDU politicians want to use the money raised “in full to strengthen a diverse retail trade in lively inner cities”.

Product safety and tax payments for products from the Far East Objection comes immediately from Handelsverband Deutschland (HDE). In relation to international online trading, the main thing is fair competition. “This does not require new taxes on parcels, but better controls to ensure that our local regulations for product safety and tax payments are also complied with for deliveries from the Far East,” said HDE Managing Director Stefan Genth.

“A package tax would also affect many domestic online retailers who are correct and punctual taxpayers,” argued Genth. “In addition, that would be a disservice to the third of stationary retailers who have built up an online business.” These companies have already increased their online sales significantly and also used large Internet platforms. “The future of retail lies in the combination of online and stationary on-site,” summarized Genth. It doesn’t help to play the sales channels off against each other.

“No substitute for fairer taxation of the Internet giants” For the opposition FDP a package tax would be “a new bureaucracy monster”. Rather, it is more important to give the retail sector “a clear and reliable opening perspective for the next year,” said FDP parliamentary group vice-president Michael Theurer. During the shutdown, all retailers across Germany should be allowed to pick up goods, he demanded.

For the SPD, parliamentary group vice-president Achim Post commented positively on the union proposal: “A kind of corona delivery of online Retailers like Amazon can be a building block for more justice in the crisis and provide concrete support to local retailers. ” Such an additional taxation of the online trade could “not be a substitute for a fundamentally fairer taxation of the Internet giants”. Their power threatens to grow further during the crisis.

Low-wage mail order workers In the boom in Internet sales, concerns about the situation of employees are also growing. Since 2008 the number of employees in the mail order business has increased from 60.022 on 161.331 in March 2020 almost tripled. According to the Federal Employment Agency, the median income of those fully employed in the mail order business last year was 2. 663 gross per month – and thus by 738 euros lower than across all industries. This emerges from a response from the Federal Agency to a request from the left in the Bundestag.

Every third full-time employee in the mail order business accordingly worked at low wages with less than two thirds of the median salary, i.e. less than two 267 Euro gross per month. The proportion of low-wage employees was almost 000 percentage points higher than for the total number of employees.

The employment relationships that began in the mail order business last year were, according to the Federal Agency, limited to around 60 percent . Across all industries, this was only 40, 7 percent. In addition, almost worked in March 022. 000 Mail order employees as mini-jobbers.

(bme)