A Permanent Position Thanks to Solidary Basic Income

Michael Schmidt
worked as a as a city guide with Berlin public transport company BVG. Now he has been taken on as a permanent employee.

Even intelligent people with many talents can fall on hard times, something Michael Schmidt experienced firsthand. But he found his way back to his ambition and gained a foothold in regular employment via a position within the Solidary Basic Income project.

In Michael Schmidt’s biography (name has been changed), high and lows merge to create an eventful story that proves that talent and great performance do not necessarily lead to a straightforward development, and even the most favorable starting position does not guarantee a successful run – too many things in life just don’t go according to plan. Born in Reinickendorf, the Berliner had both: a promising starting position and a clear vision of life.

After a childhood spent in a loving family, Schmidt passed his Abitur school leaving examination at a vocational college with a technical orientation, and planned to enter the upper grade of civil service to conduct tax audits as a financial inspector with the city government. He liked mathematics and numbers and was fascinated by technology and computers. “I really wanted to join that profession,” he said, “and had already passed the several hour-long aptitude test.”

So far, so good. But Schmidt didn’t hear back from the city government and was not given any information when he called to inquire. As a young and ambitious man, he felt he was running out of time and began considering alternatives. “I thought, I’m good at talking to people. So I joined an insurance company and sold insurance.” The job was on a commission basis and went pretty well; Schmidt soon earned a good wage and enjoyed the financial flexibility. When the Berlin city government finally contacted him with a six-month delay and invited him to a job interview based on his excellent test results, his original enthusiasm had cooled – he declined the offer.

»That was the biggest mistake of my life,” he says today. The financial inspection ship sailed without him. Too late, Schmidt realized that the insurance business had been the lesser choice. “If you sell somebody who lives on the 23rd floor of a high-rise insurance against somebody throwing a ping-pong ball through their window, you can start to feel a tad uncomfortable,” he says sarcastically when describing the inner conflict that started to trouble him more and more. “Only a few insurances really make sense, and most people already have them. When I started telling people that honestly, my employer wasn’t very impressed.”«

So Michael Schmidt left the insurance sector and started looking for a new job. A new chapter in his life started with a newspaper ad: He began an apprenticeship as a retail management assistant at a photographer’s on Hermannplatz in Neukölln. “That was a great job, really fascinating,” he rhapsodizes. “I had great colleagues, an amazing boss and learned a tremendous amount.” Here, he was able to indulge his affinity for technology; historic cameras became a particular passion of his. After completing his apprenticeship, Schmidt was given a permanent position and worked in the store for five years, over the course of which he became an expert on all kinds of cameras, from historic models to those that had only recently been launched.

But the store’s business model increasingly came under pressure: The Karstadt department store right next door had a huge photo department, and simpler and cheaper digital photography was on the rise. Redundancies were inevitable, affecting the youngest employees and those most recently hired; with a heavy heart, Michael Schmidt’s boss let him go.

To keep himself afloat, Schmidt jobbed at a service station and helped out at a supermarket. “I took anything that came my way.” That’s how he wound up at a call center for the first time. “That was with German mail-order business Quelle. I enjoyed it,” he tells us. “Because it wasn’t in sales, it was in order processing, meaning I could help customers get what they wanted, as opposed to selling them something they might not even need.” He stayed with Quelle for one and a half years.

In early 1997, the unemployment agency suggested an apprenticeship as a computer science expert in the application development department of an educational institution in Neukölln. For technophile Schmidt, this was the perfect job, and he happily took up his apprenticeship. But fate once again put a spoke in his wheel: he fell ill. His disease lasted for more than forty days, exceeding the contractually agreed limit. Schmidt was fired and not allowed to complete his apprenticeship.

There were no second chances; this would have conflicted with the unemployment agency’s regulations. “Despite the fact that this would have given me a really great perspective,” Schmidt says. “It was in the very occupational field for which people were being brought into the company from India, as we were always told. It was incredibly frustrating to know that I couldn’t enter the field again because of my illness.”

When the relationship to his then-partner also fell apart, Schmidt lost his last ounce of energy; lethargy befell him. Sometimes he would still meet his friends, but he no longer made an effort to advance his professional development. “I was very close to shutting down completely, I just didn’t want to go on,” he says. “It was a scary time. From then on, I just hung out, or if I’m honest: I was lazy. From financial inspection to the photographer’s and my apprenticeship in computer science, I felt that anything I started had always been taken away from me.”

“Participating in social life is nigh impossible on unemployment benefits. You don’t want people to keep paying for you.”

Michael Schmidt

Today, Schmidt is aware that his perspective was one-sided at the time. But when someone is in a rut, they don’t necessarily see their own situation in its entirety. For two years, he was unemployed and drifted without a goal. One day, he was giving the free Internet at a neighborhood café in Neukölln an upgrade – primarily in his own interest at the time – when he met one of the café’s dedicated employees. A lucky chance meeting, Schmidt is happy to say in hindsight: She became his wife and the mother of his children, who were born in 2005 and 2008 respectively.

The new relationship motivated him to start looking for a job again. The job center, which pays benefits to and finds jobs for long-term unemployed persons, referred him to a temp agency, which unfortunately only wanted to find a profitable placement for him, without really showing an interest in his career and qualifications. Schmidt therefore soon ended the working relationship with the agency. He was then hired by one of the very companies he would have been sent to as a temp – in a better position due to his excellent English.

And so Michael Schmidt wound up in the support department of a computer manufacturer, in the familiar surroundings of a call center. Despite shift work, he was very happy with the job. “It was great work. I was given responsibility, such as doing research or answering my colleagues’ questions, and little by little, I was trained to be a team lead. Thanks to that, I was earning quite well, despite being in the low-wage sector, and my family and I didn’t have to worry about being able to support ourselves.”

But things didn’t stay that way; the company faced restructuring and redundancies. The fact that Schmidt had to fire people against his will put a tremendous strain on him. In addition to the psychological pressure, he was assigned numerous fields of activity that he had to manage on top of his actual work.

The pressure he was under grew steadily, until his body finally refused to function: Over the course of nine months, he collapsed a dozen times. Schmidt developed high blood pressure, diabetes, and rapidly gained weight. “I ate like a horse. That’s how I ruined myself.” The emergency doctor had to come for him several times. “Until my doctor told me, quit the job. You won’t be able to keep it up in the long run.” After this setback, Schmidt needed one thing above all, besides his many medications: peace and relaxation.

“Having to draw unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed was rock bottom – especially with two teenagers at home.”

Michael Schmidt

This marked the end of his call center career – the contract with his employer was terminated by mutual agreement in 2018. After that, Michael Schmidt was on sick leave for one and a half years and lived on unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. “That was rock bottom – especially with two teenagers at home,” he says. “We struggled through. But it was a very strange moment, the first time I bought something at the store for people with low income at the Köpenick job center, which offers clothes and household goods at extremely affordable prices. I didn’t know whether to feel grateful or angry.”

Once his condition had improved, Schmidt started to “get on the job center’s nerves on the regular,” as he puts it – until he was asked if he’d ever heard of Solidary Basic Income (“Solidarisches Grundeinkommen,” SGE); maybe he would like to look into it. “They’d put up about fifty chairs for the information event, but only ten people turned up,” Schmidt remembers. “When they talked about funding, five-year contracts and the Senate’s commitment, I expected someone to come bursting through the door to tell us it was a prank and send us all home. I couldn’t believe what they were telling us.”

In early 2020, Schmidt took an SGE position as a city guide with Berlin public transport company BVG. “For almost a year, I ran around as a contact person for people who needed help finding the bus stop or other kinds of assistance. It wasn’t exactly intellectually demanding work, but it was a job. And I got to know all of Berlin doing it – every single bus and underground railway line.”

Thus Michael Schmidt joined BVG. In the meantime, the issue of the work not being challenging enough has been solved: BVG is a pioneer in helping employees in SGE positions move into regular employment relationships that are not funded. This allowed Schmidt to apply for a vacancy advertised internally; since March 2021 he has held a permanent position in the Increased Transportation Charge department, handling cases in which passengers have been caught without a ticket.

He has begun a new chapter of his life, one with real perspectives; BVG is open for talent and personal change. “They actually look at what works for me as an individual, something I would never have expected from a company this size,” Schmidt admits. “But they really take care of their own people here and make sure they are in the right roles. That’s why I feel so at home at BVG.”

Michael Schmidt is delighted to be pursuing meaningful work again. “I spend the day at work and when I go home in the evening, I know what I’ve done – I know that I’ve processed so and so many customer requests. I need that feeling. Now that I have a proper job again, I can hold my head up high again.”

Copy: Katrin Rohnstock / Rohnstock Biografien