Loading...Two pieces of news published in the German mass media cause certain discomfort, especially against a gloomy economic backdrop where Greece and Spain are going towards an incredible unemployment rate of 27.5%!
- The building of the German “employment center” will soon be made available for rent, so there’s no longer any need to invest in its maintenance (= zu vermieten)!
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All the German employment centers will dismiss 10,000 employees in the near future… simply because there will be no unemployed persons!
But let’s decode a little bit this news, which may seem strange at least for people from Southern Europe, where the unemployment rate reaches a peak in almost all the countries, from Portugal to Greece, right through Spain, Italy and even France:
The German baby-boomers are massively leaving their current working places.Karl-Heinz Paqué, Professor of Economics at the University of Magdeburg in Germany, has calculated that in the next 3-4 years people born between 1955 and 1964 will retire. That means 500,000 more people than those born since 1990 who are going to replace them in the work-field. In other words, Germany will soon need almost half a million additional employees. And if we take into account its birthrates it will surely not cover this need any longer!Even WORSE: due to retirement, the number of employed people will continue to decrease by 1.1 million until 2020, plus other 3 millions in the next 10 years (2020 to 2030)!Think of the modernization of Germany in the last 10-20 years and its impressive rise in terms of competitiveness, which led to its strong economic position on the international market. It goes without saying that due to the shortfall in the labor supply, present Germany will not be able to produce goods and deliver services as it did before, unless it decides to import workers from the neighboring European countries.In 2012 only it opened its borders for more than 200,000 employees from Spain, Portugal and Greece.
In the next few years Germany will lack unemployment, reaching instead full employment!This situation started to become obvious in 2008, when the Lehman Brothers bank collapsed in the USA and Germany’s GDP fell by 4.9% the next year (thing that had never happened in the past, during other recessions, such as the 0.9% shortfall in 1975, 0.4% in 1982 or 1% in 1993). Even in this context of unseen recession the German unemployment rate hasn’t risen significantly. In fact, it has remained stable despite experiencing the most severe economic crisis since 1931.This indicates a chronic lack of personnel in the German companies: although in crisis, the owners did their best to follow this trend and even to accelerate it.Conclusion : the German statistics predict for the next 10 years a 1-2% unemployment rate of the active population, and consequently plenty of job vacancies in Germany!
MirceaPentalog Germany
