This is precisely why capital is in a stronger position than labor - capital is the force of globalization and progress, albeit on its won terms, labor is the force of protectionism and reaction.
The fact of the matter is that the Federal Republic was designed as a show case of anti-communism, and now that the "threat" of communism is gone it is time to roll some of those perks back. It is so because the majority of the global working class earns much less than the German, or for than matter the US, labor. It is a very simple thing which Marx referred as the "socially necessary cost" of commodity production - if commodity can be produced at a lower cost it will be produced at a lower cost, and demanding higher wages is simply asking for acts of charity. Nothing has changed in that respect since the Bearded One was alive, except perhaps advances in technology giving capital more mobility.
The proper response of the Left is to address the issue from the point of view of the global working class rather than defend protectionist measures that used to guarantee a privileged position of the workers in a handful of Western countries. That is to say - to promote globalization, just as the capital does, but on alternative terms. This was the key of Marxist Left's success in the past - it denounced utopians socialism and embraced industrialization just as the capital did - but it offered an alternative version of it. This version did not produce industrial paradise on earth as some pie-in-the-sky popular activists had hoped, but it produced material living conditions much more favorable to the working class than the capital's version of industrial development.
Now, the left-of-the center parties tend to be more preoccupied with defending the welfare state in a handful western countries that providing vision and leadership for the future. Quite frankly, I do not think that the German "left" parties have anything to offer to the majority of the global working class that lives in Turkey, Poland, or China. In fact, it is German (or US) capital that invests in those countries that has more to offer for the working class there - jobs, technology, better living conditions, escape from the idiocy of the rural life.
In short, internationalism is the name of the game -and so far only the capital pays that game with reasonable proficiency, on of course to its advantage. Parties of the Left, all over Europe, and in the US (if that term is appropriate here) still have not got it and are still playing the game that is over - that of national protectionism, which has nothing to offer to the majority of the working people globally. And as long as it so, the left will be more and more marginalized.
Wojtek