In Germany, a growing export: Germans

[Aptrgangr]

In Germany, a growing export: Germans



By Erik Kirschbaum Reuters
Published: April 17, 2008

BERLIN: Germany, the world's leading exporter, has long been successful in shipping its state-of-the-art cars and machinery to just about every country.
Now, after importing workers for decades, it has a new entry on its export lists: jobless Germans.

Still plagued by high unemployment owing to the turmoil of reunification in 1990 and rigid labor laws, Germany has been helping its skilled and less-skilled jobless workers match up with foreign employers searching for manpower.
The country has also been offering financial support to cover moving and transportation costs for unemployed Germans searching for jobs across the European Union, and even as far away as Australia and Canada.
In one typical example, a newspaper in Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands of Spain, was recently filled with advertisements placed by Germans hunting for jobs.

"German seeks job in hotels or tourism," read one. "All relocation and travel costs paid for by German Labor Office."
Germany had an unemployment rate of 8 percent in February, about one percentage point higher than the euro zone average: 3.6 million people in the country are without jobs and more than 155,000 Germans emigrate each year.

Many thousands have been helped by the Labor Office's International Placement Service in Bonn, which offers to some "Mobilitãtshilfe" (mobility assistance) or a "Mobilitãtsprãmie" (mobility bonus).
The financing, known as the "Mobi," helps cover moving and travel costs for jobless Germans and their families. It is discretionary and aimed at those with job prospects abroad, although it is also available for relocations inside Germany.

"The mobility assistance benefits can be used for moves to anywhere in the world," said Sabine Seidler, spokeswoman for the International Placement Service in Bonn. "They're granted on a case-by-case basis and there's no upper limit on the sum involved. Applicants usually must have a contract and meet certain criteria. The main purpose is to help those who've lost their jobs find work as quickly as possible."
Neither the Federal Labor Office nor the placement service could quantify the total cost or impact of the system because grants were administered by nearly 200 regional offices.

Officials at the European Commission in Brussels and in Bonn said they were unaware of any other EU country offering such help for moves abroad. In Austria, unemployed people can receive a one-off payment of up to €4,632, or $7,300, for relocation costs for a job within Austria.
In France, a previous government discussed but discarded plans to help cover relocation costs inside France. But in many other countries like Denmark, where unemployment is low, there is no relocation support of any kind.
In Germany, the assistance is controversial. Economists and industry leaders say paying people to leave a country with a shrinking population and one of the lowest birth rates in the world is a recipe for disaster.
Shortages of skilled labor are now acute in industries like engineering and car production, but they also loom in sectors like retailing, health care and finance.
Meanwhile, "depopulation" has become an explosive issue in some areas, especially in the formerly Communist east.
"It's obviously better if they find work in Germany and pay tax, as well as contribute to the state's social welfare system," said Werner Eichhorst, deputy director of labor policy at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn.

"In the short term, emigration takes people off jobless rolls, but in the long term we're losing workers with skills," he said. "It's usually the best and most flexible who leave. They're also often at ages where they have children. They're lost to Germany and obviously their children won't contribute later either."

But the chief economist at Deutsche Bank, Norbert Walter, who has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the long-term implications of Germany's demographic trends, guardedly defended the state aid.
"I'm in favor of liberal answers to difficult problems," Walter said. "I see nothing wrong with someone in a difficult situation in Germany being helped to find a job elsewhere."

But he added that over the coming years, Germany would begin to need more workers. "It's obvious that we're going to need a much greater level of immigration into Germany in the years ahead," he said.
Without immigrants from Turkey and Italy, West Germany's "economic miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s would not have been possible.
But many Germans are now going the other way.
Nico Grãwert, 25, found a job as a cook in Switzerland that got him off the jobless rolls in his hometown of Hoyerswerda, east of Berlin. He had 24 hours to pack, collect travel costs from the local Labor Office, and move south.

"I'm really glad I went through it all," Grãwert told the Lausitzer Rundschau newspaper, which recently reported that the local labor office helped nearly 300 jobless Germans move abroad in the last year.
"No matter what happens down the road, it's a lot better to be in Switzerland with a job than to be unemployed in Hoyerswerda," he said.

In Germany, a growing export: Germans - International Herald Tribune