While payed work in Germany gets less this reform intends to hit unemployed people harder than before in order to motivate them to get to work and to accept lower income. As there is not enough payed work, poverty grows. The reform was mainly devised by Bertelsmann-Stiftung (=Bertelsmann-foundation, share holder and think tank of Bertelsmann media group) and named after one its further developers Peter Hartz, a corrupt manager of Volkswagen.
People use the expression "Hartz IV" today like they would use the name of a disease.
Tag descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.