“Very individual view of things”
President of the Crafts Association accuses Scholz of self-deception
08.06.2024, 00:00
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The Chancellor’s self-praise about the supposedly successful economic policy of the traffic light coalition is met with opposition from many companies. Crafts President Dittrich misses Scholz’s focus on the real criteria for success. He believes the SPD politician is deluding himself.
Jörg Dittrich, President of the German Crafts Association, has accused Chancellor Olaf Scholz of self-deception with regard to the problems facing Germany as a business location. “The Chancellor actually has a very individual view of things,” Dittrich told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. The SPD politician repeatedly points out that a record number of 46 million people are currently employed and subject to social insurance contributions and that everything is fine. There are grounds for doubt about this positive view.
“Is that still the right criterion for success? Or should we not look at whether we are well positioned for the future? Whether we are investing enough? How we can increase our weak growth potential again and what we need to be able to continue to compete with other countries?” asked Dittrich, referring to the criticism of other business associations and many economists. Even the coalition parties FDP and Greens now take the view that structural reforms are necessary. The Chancellor, on the other hand, “seems to see things differently at the moment”.
According to the report, the head of the Central Association of German Crafts (ZDH) also took his own guild to task. In the fight against the shortage of skilled workers, companies must do more to encourage young people to take up vocational training. “The skilled trades offer good pay and development opportunities, but above all security: some jobs in industry or banking, for example, may disappear due to robots or artificial intelligence. But AI cannot repair a broken pipe – probably not even in 20 years,” said Dittrich. Young people can also find social support and a connection to a “family” in the skilled trades. “Some experienced colleagues first ensure that a trainee eats regularly or arrives at the construction site on time. Or they set an example by saying please and thank you. I sometimes say pointedly: one master craftsman replaces two social workers,” said Dittrich.
Cost increase in the craft sector
The ZDH president rejected the accusation that tradesmen are hardly accessible to many customers and are also unaffordable. “It cannot be that large corporations boast about their high returns on sales, while we have to justify a few euros more, even though as tradesmen we personally take risks every day,” said Dittrich. The companies also pass on a large part of the additional income to their employees, whose wages have recently increased noticeably.
He also admitted that he was worried that some services would become so expensive that there would be no demand for them or that they would disappear into illegal work. “But that is not a problem for the trades, but for society as a whole, because we cannot influence most of the increase in costs, but rather we ultimately pass on the costs imposed on us,” Dittrich explained to the paper. “If, for example, we continue to make cement production more expensive through the CO2 price, then that may be right for climate protection reasons. But it has consequences, for example for the prices of the construction trades.”