Sanktionsfrei

Six million people on Hartz IV in Germany. That’s what passes for a legal minimum to live on—the government’s calculation of what you need to not starve. The job centers can sanction that away. Miss an appointment, file something wrong, and they cut you down, sometimes to zero. The math says you can’t live on zero euros but that’s not the system’s contradiction to solve.

Sanktionsfrei started because people got tired of waiting for the math to fix itself. Free appeals service, lawyers ready to fight, a solidarity fund that keeps you alive while the case moves through court. You win, the money goes back in. You lose, well, at least you didn’t starve on principle. It’s not elegant. It’s people working in the gaps of something broken.

I’ve been making things for twenty years—almost all of it decoration, problems that weren’t problems. This is what refusal looks like. People saying no to the machine, not once but every case. Whether it matters, I don’t know. But there’s something there.