BERLIN (Reuters) – The new government coalition in Berlin wants to attract 400,000 skilled workers from abroad to Germany each year to remedy both a demographic imbalance and a shortage of labor in key sectors, which could harm the economic rebound.
“The shortage of skilled workers has become so serious that it is slowing down our economy considerably,” said the parliamentary leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), Christian Duerr, in an interview with the magazine WirtschaftsWoche published on Friday.
“We can bring the problem of an aging workforce under control only through a modern immigration policy (…) We must reach the milestone of 400,000 skilled workers from abroad as quickly as possible”, he added.
In their coalition deal, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, FDP and Greens agreed on measures to make the German labor market more attractive, such as a points system for workers from countries outside the European Union and raising the minimum hourly wage.
Estimates by the German Economic Institute, close to employers, indicate that the country will lose more than 300,000 workers this year due to a number of retirements greater than that of entries into the market. This gap is expected to widen further by the end of the decade.
(Report Michael Nienaber; French version Jean Terzian)
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