Ask HN: Why there is a labour shortage in Germany?
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/23/german-lawmakers-approve-a-plan-to-attract-skilled-workers-to-plug-the-countrys-labor-gap
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy-crisis-inflation-push-more-german-firms-into-insolvency-study-2023-06-29/
There were 8,400 corporate insolvencies in Germany from January to June, up 16.2% from the first half of 2022 and the biggest percentage increase in more than 20 years,
How come there is a labour shortage when Germany is facing deindustrialization?
61 comments
[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] threadThe German labour market is also very peculiar. Employers are very risk averse so even though they might be lacking personnel they are not willing to hire easily, partly because firing people is also not easy. Then there is the obvious hurdle: most jobs require German.
Finally, in many job markets, like IT for example, there is a shortage of skilled professionals and an abundance of new graduates. And oftentimes employers are not willing to take on a new graduate and train them. So for example there are a number of C++ positions looking for people with 5+ years of professional experience which won't give a new graduate a chance.
People want to job hop to build up a diverse experience and no company wants to be the mug that pays an engineer during their bad years so that someone else gets to take advantage of it.
This sector's obsession with YOE as a metric of skill and thinking that nearly every new grad is useless is insulting.
The alternative is giving real contracts to international hires, who already have a proven track record (otherwise why would you hire internationally).
Trial contracts were meant for people straight out of college, but in a race to the bottom some companies have started pushing that line further and further, even having people move across the world for temp contracts. You can't complain about labor shortage while behaving like that.
The probation period also applies to you, the employee, if you choose that a company is not for you. Once that period is over, a three month notice period is quite common, so both you and the employer are locked into a relationship.
The probation period balances out how stable employment is once you both agreed that you're a match.
The immigration office is completely failing to process its current workload, and everyone is wondering how they're supposed to handle even more applicants.
It takes 3-6 months to get a work visa in Berlin these days. People get fired before they even start because employers give up on them. You can't get an appointment there so a bunch of people are stuck in the country with an expired residence permit, often for months. More and more people are suing the state for failure to act.
Then people can't find a flat. The housing crisis has dramatically worsened in Berlin and a lot of people are profiteering from the situation. It has gotten absurd in Berlin.
Then parents can't find a Kindergarten for their children.
It's a never-ending bureaucratic nightmare. Nothing ever just works. For immigrants, it's just worse.
And for what? The payoff just isn't there. You don't come for the great food, the great weather or the warm people. You don't come here because it's easy and things just work. You don't come here for the salaries.
There's a labour shortage because the salaries don't match the job requirements or the cost of living, the system does not do its job, and the reality does not match the policies set by the government.
Right now, a Künstlersozialkasse application that has been pending for over a year (each reply takes two months or more, by post). Soon the renewal of my freelance visa, which will take anywhere between 3 and 9 months with no possibility of knowing what's going on.
I've been here for a while so my life is rather stable. When you move there with a family though? It's hell for a while.
Tell me more about this
Partially.
It's doesn't work inside Germany, but it's much easier to get into Germany than the U.S. or other countries.
And they need that, the huge language disadvantage needs to be countered somehow, which they are doing on the invitation front, but not enough inside Germany.
And since these people aren't in the voting base, their issues don't matter at all to the government or the candidates.
It also doesn't help that socialist Taxes aren't exactly popular with high performers, the people Germany and other countries are competing for.
I think you never heard about lobbying. Even if their issues could matter, they don't pay for it to be pushed on the agenda.
> You don’t come here because it’s easy
Well, I can’t name another EU country with 5 (soon to be 3) years from entry to citizenship.
Also, this notorious bureaucracy - how often do you usually encounter it? In the period between applying for a Blue Card to changing a job I did it precisely 0 times. And it took me 2 days to switch jobs and pick up a new Zusatzblatt from Ausländerbehörde afterwards.
I earn a living from documenting German bureaucracy and helping immigrants to settle here, so I have a right to be sour.
It's a lot worse for employees because switching jobs involves a 3-5 month bureaucratic lag during which they don't know what will happen to their family. You might be dealing with a much faster immigration office.
"Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme" (job creation) is a one. Amount of people employed has higher priority than efficiency. So instead of having 5 people doing everything efficiently companies hire 50 to do everything manually for food. If the company wants to do things efficiently, the other reason kicks in: psychological inability to pay competitive salary, so most of the companies in Germany don't have access to competent engineers and management.
One guy makes now 2k after tax by working for a small wine seller.
He was head of the bar for over 10 years and made LESS before!
And not having any stable schedule.
Same with bakers: the good one came up with a strategy to do much less work at night and is able to find people the other one didn't change a thing.
Also in Germany it's quite common to become an engineer (metal etc) and software is still very abstract for a lot of people.
The deindustrialization thing is independent of this I think and correlates more to Germany not having any real greener resources besides coal.
There were company owner interviewed who just complained about how instable the energy is but instead of investing anything and doing something about it he prefers to create a new company location in Sweden. Which is actually not bad in my opinion we don't need to have every industry in Germany just to have it.
Germany is a dense country. And in Sachsen there is space but not much Industrie and a lot of Nazis (you know poorer and less educated people who are right wing) and I don't want to move there either.
Berlin, which is very diverse, is the second lowest. Nordrhein-Westfalen is also very far down.
The votes for the right wing party AFD correlate with education level.
It only tells you that plenty uneducated vote because you can count the votes for afd.
So it's more accurate to talk of a demographic crisis, in the case that there are not enough young people to support the old. But given that Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, that's not the case. Because if it were, labor would be reallocated from high-profit fields to lower-profit but more necessary ones, like nursing and healthcare.
what seems to be the way to go is people ladder hopping every 2 years to make it to a managerial level, because when you not a manager you are nothing in Germany salary wise. the tech worker career track simply does not exist.
Higher salaries are eroded by high cost of living and higher taxes
If you are married, it depends on what your partner earns.
If you are not married, after tax and social contributions (health insurance, unemployment insurance, state retirement fund and some other insurance) roughly 30k. Your kid is health insured for free. And you will get some money from the state each month for the kid.
Also at least 20 days of PTO, parental leave and a lot of potential sick leave (20d/y if you have a kid) for that purpose alone.
IT sector seems to have an average of 75k in the former West, 58k in the former east.
From my experience, ~42k was an entry level job with a bachelor degree in the east.
In Germany if you marry you get the option to either both stay Steuerklasse 1/4 or you get to downgrade one which has to pay a little less taxes while the other one stays higher taxed.
Patriarchially that's why married women always earn less in their Steuerklasse 5 (even if they would be paid the same) because they pay the more taxes, so that the husbands in Steuerklasse 3 pay less taxes.
Not making this up, in case you want to smash that slur button.
Oh, and it also is only useful when one party (statistically the husband) makes 60% or more of the combined income because all untaxed Freibeträge are always accounted to the one with the better income in a Gemeinsamer Güterstand.
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