Ikea Germany is to give six million euros to a proposed welfare fund as voluntary compensation to victims of the former Communist East German regime forced to make furniture components for the company while imprisoned. The Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and IKEA Deutschland announced yesterday that the furniture giant was voluntarily contributing to the German federal government’s pending new hardship fund.
Evelyn Zupke, the Bundestag special representative for helping victims of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), described IKEA’s pledge as “a conscientious approach” to dealing with issues related to “darker chapters of the company history”. He acknowledged that it was not possible to “undo what prisoners had to suffer in GDR prisons” but noted that “we can offer them respect today and support them if they face particular hardships.” Moreover, he stressed that IKEA had been under no legal obligation to make a contribution.
IKEA was among a number of Western companies that subcontracted some production to the former GDR during the Cold War. In some cases, East Germany would force prisoners to work on such production. When evidence linking this practice to IKEA started to surface in 2011-2012, a company-commissioned investigation by auditors Ernst & Young found that the allegations had merit and that IKEA management elements had to have been aware of prisoner involvement.
IKEA Germany’s CEO and CSO Walter Kadnar said yesterday that as soon as it became aware that IKEA products were being made by political prisoners in the GDR, it had sought to find “a resolution.” Given that the company had “one of the most progressive and recognised supplier codes of conduct”, it was self-evident that the company would want to take steps to minimise the damages of past transgressions against human rights or the environment. Having given “our word to those affected that we would contribute to their support“, the company welcomed the hardship fund as a means of keeping its promise, he said.
Dieter Dombrowski, chairman of the UOKG, which represents the Victims’s Associations of Communist Dictatorship, said he hoped other companies would emulate IKEA’s “groundbreaking” decision. Once a political prisoner in the former East Germany, Dombrowski later joined the Christian Democrats (CDU), and was elected to the Bundestag on reunification in 1994. An active campaigner on the forced labour issue, he is on record as describing how prisoners would work six-day weeks in three shifts, being paid from 18 to 25 East German Marks weekly. In an interview with Bild, he pointed out how this must have enabled companies in the West at the time to benefit from profit margins “higher than they are today in China.”
