A company in Schaumburg: “A 22-year-old man wants to wash a truck, but he doesn’t know how to hold the brush. “

Stadthagen. The election of Donald Trump in the US or the premature end of the federal government? Both are unlikely to remain without consequences in the region. In the speech at the 21st Schaumburg Stock Exchange Night, mostly local entrepreneurs complained about problems that are older and more fundamental than these two recent events. Energy prices, for example, and the difficulties in finding workers were part of this. Above all, bureaucratic obstacles were a concern; the removals were announced again and again, but from the point of view of the company’s leaders they were never implemented.

Nienstadt shipping entrepreneur Matthias Molthahn, for example, reported the consequences of the US election result. One of their customers is the Hanover company that exports batteries to America. “The question now is, what happens next?” said Multhahn.

Saber rattling also has an effect

Stefan Nottmeier, CEO of Sparkasse Schaumburg – the guest of the evening in Wilhelm-Busch-Gymnasium – saw it too. In the discussion, Nottemeier answered questions from the moderator and editor-in-chief of SN Marc Fügmann, together with Molthahn and Christoph Sattelmacher, managing director of Albrecht Sattelmacher KG, a sawmill in Obernkirchen.

According to Nottmeier, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s tariffs will just keep getting better. “But this hawk also has an effect.” This can be seen among Sparkasse’s corporate customers. What they need now more than ever is “reliable framework conditions”.

An 83 percent tax increase

What does that mean? For example, freight forwarder Molthahn said: A truck lasts between five and six years. If the tax is increased by 83 percent soon after the purchase to encourage people to switch to new technology, as a “forced user of diesel fuel” they have no choice but to pass on the additional costs to the customers they have An electric truck is expensive to buy, you never know how the price of electricity will improve, and the vehicles are so heavy “that I don’t even know if I can get them over our bridges,” said Molthahn and Cut Another Topic the evening: the country’s infrastructure is sometimes broken.

Here the participants spoke unanimously against keeping slaves to the debt brake. The head of Sparkasse Nottmeier made it clear that he would indeed monitor costs in his own area of ​​responsibility. In an emergency, however, you must be prepared to “reconsider decisions from time to time”. It is important to use the released investment funds for a specific purpose, for example in schools, kindergartens or roads and nothing else.

Fewer applications than ever before

What many companies also notice is that it is difficult to get employees. Good ones anyway, but now it’s often about finding someone at all. A Molthahn company says they have never received as few applications for training positions as they have in the past two years. Sometimes the colleagues did not fit in either. “A 22-year-old man wants to wash a truck, but he doesn’t know how to hold the brush,” said Molthahn, describing a shocking case – although it was not yet clear how much ‘could be a rhetorical exaggeration of his brush. part.

Is migration the answer? At least part of it, according to the Nienstädter. He cited Molthahn’s driver from Guinea as an example. But that is not a self-evident path. Others failed – and the reason was often a lack of knowledge of German.

Routes named after workers

In the Obernkirchen sawmill, which Christoph Sattelmacher runs in the fourth generation, the value of manpower as a resource is taken into account in this way: Just as cities name their streets after worthy citizens, Routes on the Sattelmacher site have long names. – time workers.

On the subject of energy costs, Sattelmacher explained that the company is on track to eventually produce 100% of the electricity it uses itself. Some of it already comes from wood chips. Overall, however, there was agreement that the costs were too high and represented a competitive disadvantage for German companies.

What gave many a reason to throw hands over his head: bureaucracy. Nottmeier, Molthahn and Sattelmacher all complained about too many strange, absurd rules and meaningless work (Molthahn: “We deal with ourselves).

Sattelmacher, for example, is fighting the EU regulation that aims to display an OR code to customers in hardware stores that allows them to see where the wood comes from. He emphasized that he was “too” against large-scale deforestation for soy or cattle farming. However, the work of a medium-sized sawmill could not be mixed with this.

Nottmeier had an example to make you laugh: According to regulations, a note was affixed in the Sparkasse company kitchen stating that only specially trained employees are authorized to operate the dishwasher.

SN