When Barbara Urch-Sengen is asked to describe the latest changes, she tells of a 15-year-old sketch. At the end of an application training, young people played the wrong world: one student, five employers to him, who try to present themselves in the best light and outdo each other with their advantages. Back then, the head of administration of the city of Beckum said that everyone laughed heartily, the scene was so bizarre.
"Today," says Urch-Sengen, "we have exactly this situation."
For example, if you are looking for civil engineers, you often do not receive a single application. Craftsmen are also hard to come by. When vying for office professionals, banks, insurance companies and retailers are tough competition for the 36,000-inhabitant city in the Münsterland.
"We have to fish in areas where the others don't," says Urch-Sengen. The city also likes to hire older people. And the 500 employees she already has are trying to be kept as much as possible: with the highest possible tariff groups for salaries, maximum flexible working hours - "we have everything from the 5 to the 41-hour week" - home office and flat hierarchies. "We are a good employer," says Urch-Sengen, "but we have to make the right effort." This is the only reason why there is currently no shortage of staff.
But Beckum is the exception. Municipalities, the federal states and the federal government are currently unable to fill around 185,000 jobs. The problem that the civil service already has today will soon affect the entire economy. An important resource is drying up for German companies: labor.
The baby boomers are retiring and lack the labor market
A crucial turning point in this development is imminent: the point in time when the pool of people who make their workforce available will be larger than ever before and than in the following decades.
This pool has grown enormously since 2010 - on average around 300,000 people a year to just over 47 million people. But: "The year that is now coming to an end will be the last one in which the workforce potential will once again grow strongly," says Enzo Weber from the Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB) increase ".
And then? The baby boomers are starting to retire, which means that significantly more older people will leave the workforce each year than young people will. The labor force will inevitably shrink.
The only question is how strong. The following graphic shows how great the effect of aging is on its own: It shows how the workforce potential would develop if there were neither immigration nor emigration and the proportion of women and older people in the labor market remains up to date , It would decrease by two million people by 2025 alone, by more than 4.5 million people by the end of the decade - and then continue to fall:
However, it doesn't have to be that drastic - and it probably won't. Two factors can slow down the shrinking workforce. However, they will not prevent it. This is also made clear by the calculations by Johann Fuchs researchers at the Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research, which were last published in a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation:
- Even more women and older people could go to work: the employment rate of both groups of people has increased significantly in recent years - but there is still some room for improvement.
- Workers from abroad can also alleviate the personnel shortage. In the decade that is now coming to an end, this immigration has been high - largely due to immigration from other EU countries. The euro crisis, which attracted many people from Spain, Italy or Greece, and the influx of refugees also played a role. On average, around 400,000 more people have migrated to Germany each year since 2010 than have moved abroad from the Federal Republic.
Most recently, however, net immigration was significantly lower, with most people coming from Romania, Poland and Bulgaria. Countries in which the economy is growing so rapidly that fewer and fewer people could decide to move to Germany in the future. In all likelihood, immigration will no longer reach the level of the past decade, also because these countries also have enormous demographic problems.
The following graphic shows how the labor potential could develop if these two factors are added. Because the researchers used the data from 2017 for their calculations, the current figures are somewhat lower than in reality - but the trends for the future are stable, says IAB economist Fuchs:
In an optimistic scenario in which women and the elderly go to work more often and the bottom line is that 200,000 people immigrate to Germany every year, the labor force will still be around 1.5 million smaller by 2030. One can assume that the average working time will increase in the coming years, which should cushion the effect somewhat, as the Federal Office for Population Research recently found. But even in the most optimistic scenario, the total number of hours worked will decrease slightly in 2030.
This development is an enormous challenge - for both companies and employees.
The economy must significantly increase the productivity of work. It was able to grow in the tens of years simply by expanding employment: Every year it created an average of 500,000 new jobs subject to social security contributions. That was because the pool of workers also grew rapidly.
Low wages are also becoming economically prohibitive
In the future, however, German companies will have to learn how to do more with fewer people, says IAB researcher Enzo Weber. Instead of quantity, as in the past, they will have to increase the quality of work.
After all: The potential for this is great. Because Germany has a huge low-wage sector, around every fourth employee is employed in it and is experiencing the negative effects. In addition to the very low income, they often perform relatively simple and therefore not very fulfilling jobs, are often only precariously employed and are rarely trained. What has always been a maladministration from a social point of view will in future also be economically unsustainable. Germany will simply no longer be able to afford bad work in the future.
In concrete terms, this means that many employees will in the future perform more complex and demanding jobs. Where, for example, an employee in a factory hall equips a machine with a metal blank hundreds of times a day, a robot will do so in the future, which will only be reassembled once or twice a day. However, the robot in turn has to be constantly readjusted and programmed - by the employee who previously performed the task and who can now use a large part of his working time more productively by looking after other robots or performing more demanding tasks. The same principle will apply to jobs in the office or for services such as delivery services.
For this to work, however, workers need to be trained far more comprehensively and intensively than before. This means that companies and also the state have to invest a lot more money in further training - and also have a strategy for it. It will depend crucially on whether companies plan their work organization correctly in the long term and have a concept for the qualification of their employees.
Desired and cared for, but also challenged
The city of Beckum has already recognized this. A so-called modular qualification started there two years ago: Administrative staff are being trained here for several areas instead of just one as was previously the case - and they are not only fit in budgetary law, but also in social law and other areas. "In the future, everyone will have to be able to do everything," says Urch-Sengen, head of administration. This means that employees can be used flexibly and also work more efficiently by thinking across specialist boundaries.
All in all, employees therefore have both pleasant and exhausting times. On the one hand, they will be sought after and sought after as a scarce commodity, enticed with high salaries and promised to be able to flexibly adapt the work to their living conditions. On the other hand, the demands on them will grow enormously, their activities will become more complex and abstract, and with them the demands on their skills. Continuing education becomes a permanent condition, constant learning the rule. Those who cannot keep up with it will have a hard time in a much more productive world of work - despite the labor shortage.
For this reason alone, Germany can no longer afford another grievance: Every year, around six percent of young people leave school without any qualifications.
