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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?
- jsjsof 3y agoWages didn't grow with inflation and nobody is dumb enough to take the jobs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dazc 3y agoThe jobs where there are shortages are not industrial, I guess? It is the same in the uk, lots of shortages in jobs that are not jobs in the way you think of a job.
- goethes_kind 3y agoTalking about the whole labour market is not useful in this case. There are labour shortages in trades, because they do not pay well, so Germans these days prefer to go to university. One of these "trades" is nursing, btw. Other such trades include elderly care. The 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.
- donnie12345 3y agoWhy employers don't want to train fresh German graduates? Makes no sense
- rcme 3y agoProbably because most new grads suck and have very low skill ceilings.
- nradov 3y agoIt is possible to identify candidates with low skills but high potential who can be trained. But most hiring managers are too lazy and incompetent to do this so instead they take the easy route of filtering based on education and work experience. Back in the early days of computing before it was really taught in most universities, IBM used to hire programming trainees based on the results of an aptitude exam. This worked pretty well and a similar approach could still be used today.
- bratbag 3y agoNo, it's because as soon as they are trained they move on. And an increasing salary doesn't stop that. 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.
- The_Colonel 3y agoMamy (most?) people would prefer to not have to job hop if the meager slary increases didn't make it almost mandatory. Even then, many people stay because they hate the idea of changing jobs so much.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI am - on paper - a new grad, but I am [demonstrably] outperforming not only everyone on my "level" in my org, but most at the level above me. This sector's obsession with YOE as a metric of skill and thinking that nearly every new grad is useless is insulting.
- nicbou 3y agoThe reality does not match the plans. The German immigration process is hampered by infuriatingly slow and opaque bureaucracy, difficulty of finding housing, and the language barrier. 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.
- donnie12345 3y agoAre you an immigrant ? If yes, What are the problems that you are facing currently ?
- nicbou 3y agoI am. All the problems, since I write about them for a living (see my profile). 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.
- donnie12345 3y ago| 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. Tell me more about this
- ahoka 3y agoOff topic, but FYI Euronews was basically bought by Orban a few years ago.
- donnie12345 3y agoThanks!! Makes lot of sense
- eecc 3y agoSome context for the curious https://www.politico.eu/article/euronews-independence-buyout-hungary-firm/amp/ https://www.politico.eu/article/euronews-independence-buyout...
- dvdkon 3y agoDo you have a source for that? Wikipedia says it has multiple owners from many different countries.
- blablabla123 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronews#2022–2023:_Alpac_Capital_ownership,_relocation_to_Brussels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronews#2022–2023:_Alpac_Capi...
- helge9210 3y agoThere are several reasons to this. "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.
- Frannyies 3y agoWhenever I see a documentation asking people about this than it's the money. 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.
- avion23 3y agoSachsen regularily scores top education marks. Source: https://www.insm-bildungsmonitor.de/ https://www.insm-bildungsmonitor.de/ 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.
- SenAnder 3y agoLabor shortage relative to what? As usually pointed out, there is no fixed amount of labor that the geographic region of 'Germany' has to perform. It's the people there that need labor performed, and adding more people will also increase the labor needed (as well as infrastructure, housing, food, education, etc..) 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.
- glitchalumni 3y agoWell I can only talk about the tech sector, but basically companies in DE/AT complain that they can't find senior+ engineers for 45k/year (pre-tax) for years now - the salary ranges have been kind of a joke (even at the top end) for quite some time and the whole discussion about the labour shortage is a political straw man.
- madduci 3y agoMany public sector positions in tech are paying this much
- iExploder 3y agosalaries for tech workers are a joke in DE/AT when accounted for cost of living, taxes and what other professionals are making. the incentives do not match the work put in, hence why they can't find people and are in constant state of "wonder". 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.
- donnie12345 3y agoReal wages everywhere are stagnant. Higher salaries are eroded by high cost of living and higher taxes
- alemanek 3y agoProblem for that region isn’t that wages aren’t growing. The issue is that they are very low to begin with. France for instance pays senior engineers much better. Poland pays better when adjusting for cost of living. Germany is on average not competitive even within its own region.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoA junior at AWS in Poland makes more than the 45k listed above.
- eecc 3y agoAlso NL, unless you’re freelancing. Some suggest it might be because of CAO (collective agreements) that fossilize wages down to pre-housing bubble rates.
- fxtentacle 3y agoIt's just a lobbying method. Companies will keep whining that they can't find employees while simultaneously refusing to pay fair salaries.