According to the agency, recent studies have shown that up to 50 percent. companies in Germany are reducing production due to staffing problems, costing the economy up to $ 85 billion. annually.
The lack of a skilled workforce – caused by an aging population and exacerbated by the pandemic – is depriving manufacturers, from Airbus to BMW to BASF, of staff.
“More and more companies are limiting their activities because they simply don’t have enough employees,” said Stefan Sauer, a labor market expert at the Ifo Institute in Munich, quoted by Bloomberg. “This problem is likely to get worse in the medium and long term.”
Unions are calling for large wage increases in a context of record inflation. The sharp rise in labor costs is a severe blow to the competitiveness of Europe’s largest economy which could not have come at a worse time.
German manufacturers – especially the more energy-hungry ones such as chemical, glass and ceramic manufacturers – have already noticed that margins are evaporating due to rising costs. Some have had to close factories or move production overseas.
Strong wage increases can help consolidate inflationwhich could lead the European Central Bank to raise interest rates more strongly.
In Business Insider Polska, we wrotethat Germany already has nearly two million job vacancies and that the problem of finding a worker is becoming as important in the European economy as electricity prices.
