AWorkers’ songs, Christmas messages and God’s blessings – the employees of the Binding brewery are doing all they can to save their jobs. They still do not want to support the plan of the Radeberger Group, which belongs to the Oetker Group, to close the traditional brewery in autumn 2023. And so the ecumenical service begins, for which some of the 150 or so affected brewery employees and supporters gathered in front of the factory gate on Saturday, with chants of “Binding stays” and before the three pastors gathered, Stefan Körzell from the national board of the Confederation of German Trade Unions to the microphone.
He even describes the closure plans as “dirty behavior”: First, the company management moved filling quantities from Frankfurt to other locations, and now they are telling the workforce that the company is not profitable. Instead, the company should examine alternative business areas to compensate for the declining beer sales. Innovation has a long tradition at Binding: “The first non-alcoholic beer was developed here,” Körzell recalls.
Appeals to politicians and expressions of solidarity
He immediately saw that the two local politicians and mayoral candidates Uwe Becker (CDU) and Mike Josef (SPD) were standing in the freezing crowd. His appeal to politics is all the clearer: Frankfurt needs industrial jobs, not just service companies and not condominiums, “which none of us can afford anyway”. The trade union official suggests that Hesse’s economics minister, Tarek Al-Wazir (The Greens), follow the example of his counterpart in Rhineland-Palatinate. In similar cases, politicians immediately seek dialogue with both sides and do not simply point out that the state government has no influence on such a company decision.
This is undisputedly true of the churches. “I don’t even know what I can tell you that is hopeful,” says Pastor Werner Otto from the Catholic Bonifatiusgemeinde at the beginning of the mass. The brewers, who are so worried just before Christmas, can be sure of the solidarity and compassion of the communities and the district. Otto and his colleagues, Silke Alves-Christe from the Evangelical Church of the Three Kings and Jörg Haeuser from the Catholic City Church, chose the biblical Christmas story to show that God stood by the “little people”, after all he only had the shepherds through his Angel informed about the birth of Jesus. At the same time, the famous passage from the Bible shows “that stories can have a happy ending, even if all indications speak against it.”