There is a particularly shortage of skilled workers in the health sector.
(Photo: dpa)
Germany is heading for a serious shortage of skilled workers. When the baby boomers retire, around 5.2 million qualified employees will leave the labor market by 2030. However, only 3.8 million young professionals are joining the group.
That is why people are already desperately looking for people in many places. Not just programmers and IT specialists. There are also gaps in nursing, handicrafts and many other professions that are indispensable for the large investment projects of the Ampelkoalition. Someone will have to set up the planned wind turbines and charging stations – just who?
In order to meet the demand, the head of the Federal Employment Agency, Detlef Scheele, calls after the net immigration of 400,000 skilled workers annually. It remains to be seen whether this will work in the short term. There is also room for improvement in the domestic workforce.
In parallel to the shortage of skilled workers, Germany has a huge low-wage sector. Many, especially women, involuntarily work part-time or are in bullshit jobs that are acutely threatened by digitization. In principle, they could switch to the industries with hot demand. But often the profiles don’t quite fit together.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Bridging this will cost a lot of time, energy and money. First and foremost with the companies, because they are looking for staff and consequently have to pay better.
Compliance with the debt brake
But the state will also incur considerable costs – for promoting further training, retraining, childcare and other things. Somehow the traffic light has to finance that, along with all the other projects, and in compliance with the debt brake.
Now a proposal by the Berlin research institute, Department Future, is making the rounds as to how this could work. After that, one would only have to change the method of calculating the “potential output”: It measures how much could be produced in the economy if all capacities were fully utilized. If this potential increases, the result is a more generous cyclical component of the debt brake, and the state would suddenly have additional spending leeway of up to 20 billion euros annually. Just like that, if the three traffic light partners come to an agreement, without the need to change the constitution.
The author is Professor of International Economics at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf.
(Photo: imago images / Jürgen Heinrich)
Opposition arose quickly. The economist Lars Feld castigated the proposal as “Pippi Longstocking Economy”. One could not simply wish for a potential output just to be able to get into more debt. Indeed, the proposal is unconventional.
But in essence it is about a legitimate question: When can a labor market be considered to be busy? So far, this question has been answered, roughly speaking, with trends from the past. If, in the near future, thousands of skilled workers remain vacant, while at the same time many people are not working at all or are working in poor jobs, then this unsatisfactory situation will at some point be declared normal.
But basically that’s wrong. Because actually the potential should describe the best possible scenario.
The traffic light will not carry out this fundamental debate in the coalition agreement. But if it decides to reform the cyclical component, which is entirely possible, then it should derive a consistent policy from it.
This means: The additional scope for spending must be used specifically to increase the potential, i.e. to alleviate the shortage of skilled workers, and must not simply be wasted somewhere in the large federal budget.
More: “The hut is on fire”: DIHK lowers growth forecast – shortage of skilled workers slows the economy