Germany: Where jobs go a-begging

Dana Russow longs for the day when she will not have to worry about staffing problems. “It’s not easy finding qualified staff to take care of the elderly,” said Dana, 41, director of Residenz Zehlendorf, a private nursing home in southwest Berlin. “This profession has such a low status in Germany.”

The low pay does not help, either: Staff earn the minimum wage of $11.60 an hour. Dana is not alone. Employers in many sectors of the German economy are facing labour shortages, under the dual pressures of an aging population and inflation-fighting measures that have kept wages low in comparison with its neighbours.

The problem was thrown into sharp relief last Tuesday with the release of official figures showing that Germany’s unemployment rate was the lowest in 18 years. While a jobless rate in single digits would be cause for celebration in many countries, in Germany it is the sign of a critical lack of workers.

For German employers like Dana, help should be on the way. As of May 1, the restrictions that Germany and Austria imposed in 2004 on east Europeans wanting to work in the two countries will be lifted. In theory, a flood of workers should be able and willing to pour into Germany, to take advantage of its booming economy and generous social benefits.

Saturation

In practice, however, economists say that many workers who wanted to emigrate from the eight east European countries that joined the European Union in 2005 have already done so — to countries like Britain, Ireland and Sweden that kept their borders open.

And even though the economy is faltering in some of those countries, like Britain and Ireland, employers are concerned that workers who have made a new home outside their native countries are unlikely to want to move again. It all adds up to a murky picture for German companies, whose need for workers is evident now and likely to grow more acute.

McKinsey, the consulting firm, published a report last year that concluded that by 2020 Germany would have a shortfall of two million qualified people to fill open jobs. The engineering sector, crucial to Germany’s export boom, says it is short of thousands of engineers.

The high-tech industry, telecommunications, manufacturing and services already need people. The Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, Germany’s leading high-tech industry organisation, says its members are short 28,000 qualified workers.

Health care is another sector in trouble. The number of people 65 and older will increase by about half until the end of the 2030s, to around 24 million from nearly 16 million now, according to the Federal Statistics Office. The population older than 80 will grow to 10 million in 2050 from nearly 4.5 million today.

In retrospect, the immigrant-worker restrictions must have looked like a good idea at the time. Fearing a huge influx of workers that would destabilise their labour markets by pushing down wages or taking jobs away from locals, Berlin and Vienna set strict conditions for any east Europeans wanting to work in their countries.

As a result, though, hundreds of thousands of young people from Poland and the Baltic States, from the Czech Republic and Slovakia packed their bags and found jobs elsewhere.

“Many have settled in other countries and learned the language,” said Joachim Moeller, director of the Labour Market Institute at the Federal Labour office. “Even though the German economy is now strong again and in need of workers, I can’t see people just moving around like that.”

Nevertheless, Moeller figures that 1,00,000 east Europeans will come to Germany after next May, drawn by perceptions that Germany is a well-run, wealthy and well-paying country with a very good social welfare system. Those qualities still attract a flexible, well-educated and skilled work force. But jobs in the services sector are not particularly attractive anymore because wages are low in comparison to other countries in the European Union.

According to Peter Verhoeven, chief operating officer of Accor Germany, which is part of one of the world’s biggest hotel groups, incentives are not sufficient to persuade young people to move lock, stock and barrel from home to another country.

It has left German industry, the services sector and the government scrambling for solutions out of concern that whatever new arrivals come after May 1 will not be enough to plug the labour gap.

NYT