In the RTL2 social documentary “Poor Germany: stamp or work”, the life of 37-year-old Mandy, a recipient of citizen benefits, is shown. Her biggest worry: She and her fiancé Pascal are having too many unplanned children.

“Of [den fünf] “One thing was planned for the children, but not for everyone else!” says Mandy. “Don't pay attention, it's here now!”

Mandy feels overwhelmed by the financial burden of having children

The fact that she is now pregnant with her sixth child is “the end of the world” for her. Her household budget does not even cover the needs of so many children.

“It's just a huge financial burden,” Mandy says. Three of the children came from failed relationships. Pascal works as a roofer, but his salary is not enough to support them all.

Very few recipients of citizen benefits avoid working

As in the case of Pascal and Mandy, many of the recipients of citizenship benefits in Germany are employees or people actively looking for work. Data from the Institute for Labor Market Research and Occupational Research (IAB) recently showed how rare refusals to work are. According to them, the frequency of refusal to work among social assistance recipients has steadily decreased since 2007.

In 2007, cuts were made in 183,430 cases due to refusal to work. In 2019 there were only 92,891. In the Corona year 2020, the number even fell to 18,392; However, due to Corona restrictions, fewer appointments were made in person, so the data cannot be easily compared with other years. In 2021, 52,000 cases were registered.

For the years 2022 and 2023 only fragmentary data is available so far, as there was a moratorium on sanctions until the full introduction of citizens' money on July 1, 2023. During this time there were very few benefit reductions because otherwise the administration would have been overloaded.

Often several cases belong to a single person.

Cases of refusal to work should not be equated with those of recipients of citizen benefits who refuse to work. In fact, according to IAB data, these are often repeat offenders, so a large number of benefit reductions due to refusal to work can be attributed to a single person.

The absolute figures also speak against the prejudice of lazy citizen benefit recipients: of 3.9 million citizen benefit recipients in 2023, 1.9 million were considered unemployed.

Compared to the other 2 million recipients of citizen benefits, the number of cases of refusal to work – for example 52,000 in 2021 or 92,891 in 2007 – was very low: 2.6 or 4.6 percent.