Gunter Thielen Presents Prizes To Winners Of Employment Contest

On Friday at the Ministry for Labor and Social Affairs in Berlin, six companies received an award for their outstanding dedication to employment policies. They prevailed over a large number of competitors in the second "Designing Employment – Companies Taking Responsibility" contest jointly rung out by the Ministry for Labor and Social Affairs and the Bertelsmann-sponsored "Initiative for Employment!" As the initiators of the contest, Germany’s Minister for Labor and Social Affairs Franz Müntefering and our CEO Gunter Thielen opened the event. "The winning companies are paragons of an entrepreneurial responsibility," declared Gunter Thielen in his speech at the award ceremony. "They encourage us to look ahead, and inspire us to shape the future– and that is what Germany urgently needs."

This year’s winners are EKO Stahl (Eisenhüttenstadt), Bad & Heizung Kreuz (Schallstadt), Bayer AG (Leverkusen), Geiger Fertigungstechnologie (Pretzfeld), EUROGATE (Bremen) and Holz- and Dachbau Raddatz (Reinfeld). Their representatives stepped up to accept the award certificates from Franz Müntefering and Gunter Thielen in front of some 200 guests. Earlier, a panel of 16 judges chaired by Gunter Thielen had picked the winners from 161 applicants. This second round of the contest, said Thielen, once again showed that the German employment market can only be readied for the future if corporate conduct is given a key role. He expressed his hope that the employment ideas of the winning and nominated companies would be copied by many others – after all, business and society alike benefit from the implementation of innovative ideas.

Other companies on the shortlist of winners included BKB Aktiengesellschaft (Helmstedt), Dr. August Oetker Nahrungsmittel KG (Bielefeld), Feinbäckerei Thiele GmbH (Göttingen), Huber Haustechnik GmbH (Murnau), J. Schmalz GmbH (Glatten), RAG Aktiengesellschaft (Essen), Randstad Germany (Eschborn), and Weidmüller Interface (Detmold).