Labor market
Ifo Institute: Companies want to cut jobs
The situation is bad, especially in industry. Another sector of the economy, on the other hand, ensures minimal relaxation.
The companies in Germany want to reduce jobs. Especially in industry and trade, the companies are currently clearly tending to do jobs in the next three months than to build up, as can be seen from a current survey by the Munich Ifo Institute. “The situation on the labor market remains tense,” says Klaus Wohlrabe, head of the IFO surveys.
Specifically, the IFO employment barometer is currently 93.4 points. It has been tending down with certain fluctuations for several years, most recently even without these fluctuations. In January it now shows a minimal recovery by one point. The driver of this development is the service sector. After an improvement by 3.4 points in January, the companies currently predominate with hiring plans. According to IFO, new employees are sought in tourism and IT service providers. This also pulled up the overall index.
Industry particularly suffers
On the other hand, it looks much worse in industry. Here the balance of positive and negative reports is minus 22.8 and thus even worse than in December. The number means that the proportion of those companies that want to reduce jobs is 22.8 percentage points greater than the proportion of those who want to build jobs. There is currently no recovery here, it said from the IFO. The balance with minus 15.6 is also clearly negative in stores. It is said that fewer staff are needed here due to a weak purchase mood. On the construction, the location with minus 3.8 is not quite as dramatic, the service sector already mentioned is even minimal at 1.0.
The index is based on the reports of around 9,500 companies in the processing trade, the main building industry, wholesale and retail and the service sector for their employment plans for the next three months.
dpa
Source: Stern
