Shortage of skilled workers: SMEs want more immigration from abroad

In view of the lack of skilled workers, the Federal Association of Medium-Sized Enterprises sees Germany’s competitiveness threatened.

“More and more companies in all industries are currently unable to find skilled workers or trainees,” said Federal Managing Director Markus Jerger to the newspapers of the Funke media group. “This fundamentally jeopardizes the competitiveness of medium-sized companies and thus Germany as a location as a whole.” Rising freight rates and bottlenecks in intermediate products such as semiconductors are also currently causing problems for the German economy.

“Need targeted immigration of skilled workers”

To combat the shortage of skilled workers, Jerger calls for more immigration: “We need the targeted immigration of skilled workers, with the emphasis on skilled workers.” Many companies would have to reject orders due to a lack of qualified staff, said Jerger. It doesn’t look any better for the trainees. “There are more than 390 recognized training occupations in Germany, and there is a shortage of new trainees in almost all of them.”

The chairman of the board of the Federal Employment Agency, Detlef Scheele, told the “Welt am Sonntag”: “A total of around 1.2 million workers, two thirds of them skilled workers, are currently being sought.” There are already staff shortages at specialist level in around 70 professions. At the end of August, Scheele said that Germany needed around 400,000 immigrants per year to compensate for the increasing shortage of skilled workers.

Truck drivers, among others, are currently in great demand. «There are too few professional drivers in freight transport. That will slow down future economic upturns ”, it says in a report published on Saturday by the employer-related Institute of German Economy (IW) in Cologne on the shortage of truck drivers in Germany. While the shortage of skilled workers as a result of the pandemic-related economic slump among drivers went to zero at the beginning of the Corona crisis, the driver shortage returned with the economic recovery after the first lockdown. “In September 2021, 6659 truck drivers were again missing in Germany – and the trend is rising sharply,” says the report.

Hardly any professional drivers under 35

Above all, the youth situation is therefore critical. “In 2020 only 13.6 percent of professional drivers in freight transport were under 35 years of age,” it says. The average for all employees subject to social insurance contributions is 29.3 percent.

There is also a lack of truck drivers in Great Britain – the massive shortage has caused considerable problems in recent weeks. A number of petrol stations were left dry because the fuel could not be transported to them. Supermarket shelves remained partially empty. Here, however, the Brexit worsened the situation: Many drivers from the EU returned to their home countries during the pandemic and will not be able to easily live and work in Great Britain again after Brexit. The government issued temporary visas to alleviate the situation and let the military help out. However, there is no real easing of the situation in sight.

According to a report on Sunday, a number of bus drivers in the UK are now choosing to switch to the truck steering wheel. The churn is due to the blatant shortage of truck drivers, which is causing wages to rise in the industry, said Bobby Morton of the union Unite, the broadcaster Sky News. Like truck drivers, bus drivers would have long shifts and not enough toilets and sanitary facilities.

In addition to the bottlenecks among truck drivers, rising container prices and freight rates as well as the shortage of intermediate products such as semiconductors are currently leading to global supply chain problems. The foreign trade association BGA is still expecting strong export growth this year. “We got off to a very good start to the year and are therefore currently seeing no signs of accepting our forecast of nominal growth of 13 percent, despite a slowdown,” said the new President of the Federal Association of Wholesale and Foreign Trade (BGA), Dirk Jandura, of the German press -Agency. The export of goods would thus exceed the level before the Corona crisis.

Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) exchanged views with representatives of the relevant industries last week on how the supply chains can be stabilized against the background of the current challenges, as the Federal Transport Ministry tweeted on Sunday. There are currently global bottlenecks and disruptions in the supply chains. The situation in Germany is less critical, it said. “All logisticians say: There is no danger that the Christ Child will run out of gifts in December.”