There is a lack of staff everywhere – in the catering trade, in the hotel industry, at the airport. At the same time, 1.6 million people are registered as unemployed. How does that fit together?
There are two figures in Germany that nobody seems to bring together. Or nobody wants to bring together. 1.7 million and 1.6 million. One is the number of vacancies for which workers are urgently needed. The other is the number of people who are unemployed and receive Hartz IV.
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There is a lack of staff everywhere. In gastronomy, in the hotel industry, at the airport. We know that Germany has a skilled labor problem. This lament sounds as reliable as the ringing of bells on a Sunday. But we are not talking about special tasks here, but about simple activities, i.e. jobs that anyone with two hands can do.
You don’t need a high school diploma or previous knowledge to unload suitcases or clear tables. You don’t even have to speak German. All one needs is a healthy cross and the will to make oneself useful.
“Where have they all gone?” asked the “Spiegel” the week on its cover. It’s an enigma. Hundreds of thousands are missing and no one can really explain where they have gone. If only the physically strenuous jobs remained empty, for which no one scrambled in the past, that would be understandable. But they are also desperately looking for people to help at the gas station or at the bakery.
An even bigger mystery is that no one puts two and two together and takes a look at those who don’t go to work when they could. 1.6 million people of working age receive Hartz IV, plus family members. And not all of them are IT specialists or post-docs for whom there is currently no follow-up use.
How should one imagine the typical Hartz IV recipient? One suggestion: a single mother, a medical student with twenty years of professional experience, who felt shaken when the man left her. Now she is at the table to get fresh fruit for the children. In return, the eight-year-old son brings home a “one with an asterisk” in mathematics. This is what Kathrin Hartmann says in “Unfortunately, we have to stay outside”, one of the classic poverty reports.
Also in “Die Elenden” by Anna Mayr, the latest approach to the genre of reports from the fringes of society, it is always a chain of unfortunate circumstances that causes the person who was just living in the middle of life to stumble and fall. There’s the woman who falls for a marriage swindler. Or the young mother who is knocked to the ground by an illness. Or the man whose company is caught up in the maelstrom of the pandemic. Of course, everyone dreams of a return to the world of work, which somehow never materializes, despite all the letters of application.
That is the sentimental view of perpetual unemployment. The other would be that we are dealing with people who have been weaned from regular employment for so long that they no longer even know what work is. Whatever you think about it, you’d like to know where you stand. We spend 44 billion euros a year on the Hartz IV state. It’s one of the biggest items in the budget, almost as big as the defense budget that’s being fought over right now.
But you don’t read anything about it. The cover story in “Spiegel” on the new job crisis covers eight pages. The path of devastation left behind by the lack of personnel in the economy is impressively presented. But not once is it mentioned that there are thousands of unemployed people who could immediately be sent to the airport to keep it running.
The government, too, would rather look for workers in Turkey than think about how to bring wages back to those who supposedly comb through job advertisements every day. One of the new government’s first bills was to ease the pressure on those unwilling to work. So far, someone who was completely stubborn had to reckon with a deduction from Hartz IV benefits. That’s over for now. From now on, money will always flow, regardless of whether someone is cooperative or not.
It’s no coincidence that it was the Greens who pushed for the relief. Anyone who only knows life on the fringes of society from the newspaper tends to glorify the situation. In the case of the Social Democrats, things are different. The SPD still has a sizable number of supporters in its ranks who live next door to people who would rather turn around in the morning than go to work.
It was always a misconception that the so-called lower wage brackets would have a special understanding of life on props. Social romance is also a class issue. The further away you are, the easier it is to feel sorry for someone. The Lidl saleswoman has nothing but contempt for the useless people who have settled into Hartz IV life and, if in doubt, mock them for torturing themselves through the day.
The anger over the Hartz IV reforms was not aimed at sanctions for rascals and slackers. What caused a lack of understanding was the decision by red-green to make life difficult for people who had paid into unemployment insurance for years. This was felt to be deeply unfair. Anyone who has worked hard all their life knows very well where the line is drawn between lazybones who don’t want to work and drudges who were just unlucky because the shipyard collapsed or some jerks at corporate headquarters started the next restructuring program.
In the public debate about life on the fringes of society, poverty appears exclusively as a financial problem, which is why all social programs tend to mobilize more money. The practitioner, on the other hand, knows that the question of getting up in the morning with the children is not one of money. Even the poorest church mouse can set an alarm clock so that the children have had breakfast before they set off for school.
Does poverty exist through no fault of your own? But yes. You just have to queue up at a sign to see it. Should the government alleviate the distress? I would be for it in a heartbeat. One of the great injustices of the welfare state is that you can have worked all your life without being protected from poverty later on.
But not everyone who receives Hartz IV is a victim of the circumstances. For some it is simply a matter of calculation. Anyone who is the head of a family of four at the cash register or lugging moving boxes could quit the job tomorrow without being in a much worse position. The grants for a Hartz IV household with two children including rent amount to 2100 euros net. If there are more than two children in the house, there are significantly more.
Politicians can choose to leave people alone. We continue to accept that hundreds of thousands live at the expense of those who run the shop. But what we should stop doing is pretending that every Hartz IV recipient dreams of a job that, for some inexplicable reason, never comes about.
Anyone who cannot find a job in view of the 1.7 million orphaned jobs is either unable to work or unwilling to work. The situation does not allow any other conclusion.
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
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