2024-04-06 13:30:00
“It sounds like a different world, but most of the things we have today were utopias in the beginning.”
The labor and skilled labor shortage in Germany is increasingly a concern for business, politics and society. There are many reasons for this, says Prof. Dr. Norbert Schneider, President of the German Society for Demography.
“The common narrative is: The baby boomers are aging out of the labor market. The new generations are much smaller. This view is reductive because there are other important causes.”
“We have to think about the whole thing in a multifactorial way and not reduce it to demographic change.”
Other factors include, for example, cultural change, changing work motivation, later entry into the workforce or internal migration from rural regions to cities.
In some professional groups, the shortage and lack of young talent is particularly clear:
“We have a shortage in personal services, in care, in the catering industry as an example. In general, you can say that we have a shortage in poorly paid professions with unfavorable working conditions and poor or low social prestige. We have a shortage there and it It is absolutely clear that less and less attractive jobs are being chosen by fewer and fewer people.”
But there is also a lack of replacements in scientific and technical MINT professions.
The proportion of people over 55 in this area was just under a quarter (24 percent) in 2021, compared to just 17 percent around ten years earlier.
The situation is similar for nursing staff: in 2021, 23 percent of all nursing staff were older than 55 years, in 2012 this proportion was 15 percent.
In mechatronics, energy and electrical occupations, the proportion of older employees increased from 17 percent to 22 percent.
Many experts advocate the solution of getting more workers through migration. However, if you look at the forecasts, it becomes clear that migration alone cannot solve the problem.
Even with high immigration numbers
(Variant 3) there will be 1.6 million fewer employed people by the mid-2030s than there are now.
With lower immigration numbers (variant 1), there could even be 4.8 million fewer.
Olaf Scholz recently emphasized the importance of immigrants for Germany:
“Our prosperity and performance, our companies, would not exist without the many citizens who have immigrated to Germany over the past decades. Now we urgently need more immigrants in our labor market.”
This graphic shows which countries the most working-age people immigrate from.
In the years 2017 to 2021, around 40 to 50 percent of immigration was made up of people with Turkish, Syrian, Romanian, Bulgarian or Indian nationality.
“We simply have to see that a large proportion of these immigrants are people who come to us seeking protection. First of all, not as people who come to us as qualified workers.”
“So we have a lot of immigration. The smallest form is actually labor immigration from third countries.”
Nevertheless, the number of qualified workers from non-EU countries coming to Germany has increased – both for people with and without a Blue Card.
The Blue Card is a residence permit for academics who come from outside the EU. Requirements for receipt: university degree, a specific job offer and a certain minimum annual gross salary.
But the much-vaunted immigration is not the holy grail, warns the expert:
“The Schnitzler economist said that we need 1.5 million immigrants per year to fill the supposedly demographically caused shortage. That is of course completely impossible.”
“Migration will never solve the problem we have. It can reduce the problem.”
You have to take other factors into account – and, according to his thesis, rethink the classic CV.
“For 150 years, I would say, it has been organized as a three-phase model: training, learning, activity, retirement. And that is now absolutely obsolete.”
The younger generation starts working life later and has more interruptions in the form of sabbaticals, for example.
“We simply have to understand that middle adulthood doesn’t just consist of activity, but that you also need periods of rest there. So in this respect, we basically have to organize the life course in such a way that we learn permanently that we can and want to be permanently active that we constantly feel the need or would like to take longer breaks.”
“It sounds like a different world, but most of the things we have today were utopias in the beginning.”
The economy must react flexibly to this change, Schneider concludes.