Jobs in the east pay less: hundreds of thousands commute to the west

Jobs in the east paid less
Hundreds of thousands commute to the west

The pressure to be mobile at work does not decrease. Many people still accept an additional burden on their health, family and the environment for more money. Wherever the least is earned, employees travel particularly long distances to get to work.

Immediately after the fall of the Wall, people in the towns of the Thuringian Forest got on buses in the middle of the night. They made their way over poor mountain roads to the greater Nuremberg area to work for large companies for little money. In the afternoon we went back – and after the arduous day and hours of bus travel, mostly straight to bed. This kind of commuting – close to the limit of exploitation – is over. But in Germany the commuting continues – as statistics from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) show.

"The pressure to be mobile at work and to travel long distances to work has continued unabated over the past few years," says Sabine Zimmermann, a member of the Bundestag. Including burdens for health, family and the environment. "There are still significantly more employees from eastern Germany commuting to work in the western federal states than in the opposite direction," says the left-wing member of the Bundestag who evaluated the BA statistics.

"In mid-2020, 407,927 East German employees subject to social insurance commuted to the West. Conversely, in 2020 only 177,601 employees came from West Germany to work in the new federal states," says Zimmermann, referring to the figures from the Nuremberg statisticians. It is still the lure of the euro that drives people from the new federal states to work in the West. Full-time East German commuters received an average gross income of 3,588 euros per month at their place of work in West Germany (as of the end of 2019). In East Germany as a place of work, the median wage was only 2827 euros.

Migration of workers from east to west

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is at the very end of the scale with a gross figure of 2659 euros, while Baden-Württemberg, with a gross figure of 3755 euros, is more than 1000 euros higher. East German full-time commuters heading west thus earned an average of 761 euros or almost 27 percent more than those employees subject to social security contributions who work in the east. "The high excess of commuters from east to west is still an expression of the flight from low wages in the new federal states. The east German labor market is still considerably relieved and the problems are covered up," says Zimmermann.

The chief executive of the Federal Employment Agency, Detlef Scheele, does not see it as that dramatic. "The east-west scheme that once existed no longer exists," says Scheele. Since 2017 there have been indications of a reversal of the former migration of workers from east to west. However, Scheele also sees further differences, for example in economic structure, income and demographic development.

From Thuringia, for example, more than 28,000 of the 791,000 employees subject to social security contributions are still driving to work in the West – almost 10,000 of them to neighboring Bavaria, as the statistics show. That is more than in the other eastern German territorial states, although Thuringia is the second smallest of the new states. But: 33,000 of the five million Bavarian employees also commute to Thuringia.

. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) Germany (t) Labor market (t) Eastern Germany