Article 9 of the Basic Law protects the right to form associations to improve working and economic conditions. From it follows the Tarifautonomie, under which unions and employers set wages free from state interference. A statutory minimum wage arrived only on 1 January 2015, at 8.50 euros an hour. Its adjustments were left to a commission in which unions and employers each have three voting members. In 2022 the Bundestag instead raised the minimum wage by law, to 12 euros from 1 October. When the plan was presented, the president of the employers’ federation BDA, Rainer Dulger, called it a grobe Verletzung der Tarifautonomie, a gross violation of bargaining autonomy. The federation complained that the increase was set without the commission that was actually responsible.