It’s a Family Thing : (Page 3)
September 17, 2012[3] Ibid.
[4] Christoph Strünck, „Global denken, lokal handeln: Die Aufgaben der regionalen Arbeitgeberverbände“ in Die Wirtschafts- und Arbeitgeberverbände in Politik und Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schroeder and Bernhard Wessels (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010).
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In purely rational economic terms, whenever there is an imbalance between supply and demand (as here, where there apparently is a demand for more workers, but insufficient supply), it is the PRICE which is not in balance.
Either employers are not offering enough, or workers are demanding too much (which is easy to see given the distortions unemployment comp, etc introduces here).
This has been played out MANY times before, starting as early as the early 1960s:
The claim that Germany was suffering a labor shortage, and thus had to import “guest workers” is basically false, really a pernicious lie:
What really happened is that employers were unwilling to increase the amount of compensation that would have been needed to bring more workers into the labor force (just compare the structure of the labor force back then in Germany to the one found there today, or esp. here in the US, in terms of composition and breadth).
Had they done so, no imports of workers would have been needed, and a bunch of other issues would look quite different today.
The “Montankrise”, with the horrendous subsidies going to coal and already ruinous back then, leading to the slow wind-down of 100,000s of jobs was already in place at that same time. All of those most heavily state-funded jobs could have, and should have been let to find employment where it was really needed, instead of being filled by imported labor.
These montan-workers were no less skilled than the imports from southern Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, so training is not an argument.
Today of course this is much worse, because at least back then, the fictitious labor shortage was in an officially low unemployment environment, however today, this “shortage” exists in a high unemployment context, proving even more the distortions of the market, due to the myriad of labor laws in place for many decades.
Chris,
thank you very much for your comment. It is true, that the price plays a very important role in this discussion. So the question might be: Is there a shortage of skilled workers or is there a shortage of *cheap* skilled workers? In my short commentary I just wanted to mention, that there is a discussion in Germany about a skills shortage, too. If you are interested in the discussion about skills shortage in Germany, I can recommend you to follow the academia dispute between Karl Brenke of the DIW (German Institute for Economic Research) and Oliver Koppel of the iw (Cologne Institute of Economic Research).
Greetings,
Carsten