new York The year 2021 will go down in US history as the year of the “quitters” – the workers who quit their jobs. More than four million people gave up their jobs there between August and October every month. Companies complain that they can no longer be filled. “The job market is extremely tense,” noted US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
The many German companies in the USA are also feeling the effects of the tense situation. A total of 4,500 German companies employ more than 700,000 people there. After almost two years of Covid management, they have to cope with an even more difficult job market.
“The issue of the shortage of workers is clearly an issue for our members,” observes Dietmar Rieg, Managing Director of the German-American Chamber of Commerce in New York. “Our greatest challenge is to find qualified employees,” confirms Oliver Baumann, who works with Bauman Consulting to advise customers on energy-saving solutions for buildings. The order book is full: “But we cannot find enough new heads to do the work that we have.”
Big corporations are also starting to worry. With an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, the market is pretty much empty. Good employees can simply switch to another job, some simply turn away from the job market. “We feel the pressure,” observes the CEO of Volkswagen in the USA, Scott Keogh. “The competition for employees is very fierce at every level.” VW is currently massively expanding its location in Tennessee and will probably have to hire even more workers. This makes it all the more important not only to attract employees, but also to keep them.
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Keogh believes that having a loyal workforce is a long-term strategic asset. “We offer very good services and we take care of our employees,” he explains, citing the way in which employees are dealt with during the pandemic as an example. The employees were sent home, but they continued to pay: “That was not the case with all companies in the USA.”
With own training against the shortage of workers
Alan Watson, Director for Bosch in Charleston, North Carolina, relies primarily on an internal training program: “This helps to increase the supply of labor – and thus to reduce the labor shortage a little.”
Bosch not only works with local colleges to achieve this. Watson also invites high school students to the plant. “In their books they learn what a work looked like 20 years ago. But when you come to a modern plant like Bosch today, it looks completely different, ”explains Watson. “I think that really piques young people’s interest.”
“The training programs are extremely important,” says Teri Simmons, attorney who advises German companies for Arnall Golden Gregory law firm in Atlanta. Corporations such as VW, Bosch or BASF and many others have therefore developed programs in the USA that are based on the German dual model of teaching.
Bruno Chapoutot, Vice President NAFTA at the automotive supplier Elring-Klinger, names the shortage of workers as one of the greatest challenges. The company currently has many orders and is soon to supply an electric car manufacturer in Texas. Finding the right employees for this is not always easy. Elring-Klinger is also increasingly relying on internal training and further education.
Retaining employees is just as difficult. “When the state aid ran out, we thought everyone would come back. But that wasn’t the case, ”reports Chapoutot. Many people had to look after their children or would have noticed that life without work can also be pleasant. “That’s when we realized that some of them weren’t going to come back at all,” he says.
His advice on how to keep most employees is, “Don’t force them back into the office. Then you have lost. ”He himself opened the offices again after working from home. But he tries to accommodate the living conditions of the employees as much as possible: “We have space for 50. But only two are there every day.”
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