Why there is a labour shortage in Germany?

The global recession?

The jobs where there are shortages are not industrial, I guess? It is the same in the uk, lots of shortages in jobs that are not jobs in the way you think of a job.

Talking about the whole labour market is not useful in this case. There are labour shortages in trades, because they do not pay well, so Germans these days prefer to go to university. One of these "trades" is nursing, btw. Other such trades include elderly care.

The German labour market is also very peculiar. Employers are very risk averse so even though they might be lacking personnel they are not willing to hire easily, partly because firing people is also not easy. Then there is the obvious hurdle: most jobs require German.

Finally, in many job markets, like IT for example, there is a shortage of skilled professionals and an abundance of new graduates. And oftentimes employers are not willing to take on a new graduate and train them. So for example there are a number of C++ positions looking for people with 5+ years of professional experience which won't give a new graduate a chance.

The reality does not match the plans. The German immigration process is hampered by infuriatingly slow and opaque bureaucracy, difficulty of finding housing, and the language barrier.

The immigration office is completely failing to process its current workload, and everyone is wondering how they're supposed to handle even more applicants.

It takes 3-6 months to get a work visa in Berlin these days. People get fired before they even start because employers give up on them. You can't get an appointment there so a bunch of people are stuck in the country with an expired residence permit, often for months. More and more people are suing the state for failure to act.

Then people can't find a flat. The housing crisis has dramatically worsened in Berlin and a lot of people are profiteering from the situation. It has gotten absurd in Berlin.

Then parents can't find a Kindergarten for their children.

It's a never-ending bureaucratic nightmare. Nothing ever just works. For immigrants, it's just worse.

And for what? The payoff just isn't there. You don't come for the great food, the great weather or the warm people. You don't come here because it's easy and things just work. You don't come here for the salaries.

There's a labour shortage because the salaries don't match the job requirements or the cost of living, the system does not do its job, and the reality does not match the policies set by the government.

Wages didn't grow with inflation and nobody is dumb enough to take the jobs.

Off topic, but FYI Euronews was basically bought by Orban a few years ago.

There are several reasons to this.

"Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme" (job creation) is a one. Amount of people employed has higher priority than efficiency. So instead of having 5 people doing everything efficiently companies hire 50 to do everything manually for food. If the company wants to do things efficiently, the other reason kicks in: psychological inability to pay competitive salary, so most of the companies in Germany don't have access to competent engineers and management.

Labor shortage relative to what? As usually pointed out, there is no fixed amount of labor that the geographic region of 'Germany' has to perform. It's the people there that need labor performed, and adding more people will also increase the labor needed (as well as infrastructure, housing, food, education, etc..)

So it's more accurate to talk of a demographic crisis, in the case that there are not enough young people to support the old. But given that Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, that's not the case. Because if it were, labor would be reallocated from high-profit fields to lower-profit but more necessary ones, like nursing and healthcare.

Whenever I see a documentation asking people about this than it's the money.

One guy makes now 2k after tax by working for a small wine seller.

He was head of the bar for over 10 years and made LESS before!

And not having any stable schedule.

Same with bakers: the good one came up with a strategy to do much less work at night and is able to find people the other one didn't change a thing.

Also in Germany it's quite common to become an engineer (metal etc) and software is still very abstract for a lot of people.

The deindustrialization thing is independent of this I think and correlates more to Germany not having any real greener resources besides coal.

There were company owner interviewed who just complained about how instable the energy is but instead of investing anything and doing something about it he prefers to create a new company location in Sweden. Which is actually not bad in my opinion we don't need to have every industry in Germany just to have it.

Germany is a dense country. And in Sachsen there is space but not much Industrie and a lot of Nazis (you know poorer and less educated people who are right wing) and I don't want to move there either.

Well I can only talk about the tech sector, but basically companies in DE/AT complain that they can't find senior+ engineers for 45k/year (pre-tax) for years now - the salary ranges have been kind of a joke (even at the top end) for quite some time and the whole discussion about the labour shortage is a political straw man.

Also NL, unless you’re freelancing. Some suggest it might be because of CAO (collective agreements) that fossilize wages down to pre-housing bubble rates.

It's just a lobbying method. Companies will keep whining that they can't find employees while simultaneously refusing to pay fair salaries.