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It is estimated that some 300,000 working people will leave the system this year, which could generate a major problem for the German pension system in the short term.
A population that needs to renew itself. The new German government seeks to address the imbalance in the labor market and deal with labor shortages in key sectors of the economy.
“The shortage of skilled workers is already so serious that it is drastically slowing down our economy,” Christian Duerr, parliamentary leader of the Free Democrats co-government, told the business magazine ‘WirtschaftsWoche’.
According to Duerr, Germany needs to attract some 400,000 foreign workers each year to avoid the consequences of a lack of workers, something that the United Kingdom is still going through and has left it with empty gas stations and empty supermarket shelves.
“We can only control the problem of an aging workforce with a modern immigration policy… We have to reach the mark of 400,000 skilled workers from abroad as soon as possible,” Duerr added.
Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, Duerr and the green ecologists, agreed on measures such as a points system for specialists from non-European Union countries and raising the national minimum wage to 12 euros, or about $13.60 an hour for make working in Germany more attractive.
According to data from the German Economic Institute, the workforce will shrink by more than 300,000 people this year. In the current system, there are more older workers retiring than young people entering the labor market.
But that gap will widen to more than 650,000 in 2029, leaving a cumulative deficit of working-age people in 2030 of about five million. Despite this, employed Germans grew to nearly 45 million last year.
Decades of low birthrates and uneven migration could become a problem for Germany’s public pension system, where fewer employees have to finance the pensions of a growing mass of retirees.
with Reuters
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