It's been raining cash over Berlin's Red City Hall this
week, if nowhere else. Maybe I should move?

ONE NICE THING ABOUT being a freelance simultaneous interpreter is that, if a job is cancelled at the last moment, you still get paid for all the hours you were contracted to do. This has happened maybe three times in all the years I have been in the profession. I think this arrangement is fair since I have in many cases already turned down other offers for the same time slot and, after all, we freelancers don’t get many breaks anyway. But what do you call it when someone who has done precisely nothing gets showered with sums that people like me would regard as a small fortune?

This is the case in Berlin this week, where the city is abuzz with the story of justice and consumer protection senator (i.e. minister) Michael Braun from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, who stepped down from his post at the Red City Hall on Monday after a mere ten days in office following revelations that he had been involved in some shady private real estate deals. Now it appears that Braun has a claim on so-called “bridge money” – an arrangement called a “golden parachute” in US business circles or (and I like this better) a “golden handshake” in Germany. So how much is he going to get? 50,000€ ($64,854). Let me put that in writing: fifty thousand euros for just a week and a half of dirty dealing.

To make things even dirtier, Braun didn’t actually quit, but instead asked Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit to dismiss him “in order to prevent damage to the office of justice and consumer senator,” as his CDU colleague Florian Graf told the Tagesspiegel. It turns out that if Braun had simply resigned, he would have lost his benefits. By requesting dismissal he can claim innocence while continuing to suck on the public teat.

 
A "victim of one-sided and incessant press reports"? 
"Dismissed" justice and consumer
protection minister Michael Braun
(Source: Berliner Kurier)

As senator, Braun was entitled to 10,719€ ($13,904) per month, plus several hundred euros in added benefits, including extra allotments for his two children. The “bridge money” is made up of three months at full salary and another three months at half pay. Despite his disgrace, he will remain a member of Berlin’s municipal House of Representatives and continue receiving his full pay from that institution.

The Taxpayer League is predictably livid, with its president, Alexander Kluge, calling the pay-off “a monstrosity.” You see, Berlin isn't exactly Dubai, where payoffsments like these might be regarded as small change. And is it just me, or does this affair smell like the Guttenberg business, where the disgraced defense minister demanded a full military “Grand Tattoo” to mark his hasty withdrawal from public service?

Let’s hope Braun uses the money wisely, because it looks as if his ten days as a senator, while lucrative in the short term, don’t add up to a pension. According to law, “Following the termination of his/her official salary, a former member of the Senate has a claim to a pension providing that he/she was a member of the Senate for at least four years.” So thank heaven for small blessings.

Of course, the scam over at the Red City Hall is truly peanuts compared to what goes on in the world of "free enterprise." For example, over at Lehman Brothers, CEO Richard Fuld pocketed $22 million in extra cash and earned $354 million over his last four years, then sold $490 million in Lehman stock right before the bottom fell out of his company.

Now, care to guess how much of a “golden handshake” I’ll get if I decide to “ask for my dismissal” as a freelancer? 0.

Let me put that in writing: z-e-r-o. Or, as we say in Berlin, jarnüscht. And there’s no pension, either, let alone a dental plan. And there's no Christmas bonus, just a Christmas drought until business starts up again in January. All I ever get is what I can charge per hour of intense labor - minus interest charges on my overdraft account.

That’s why I sometimes suspect I’m in the wrong business.