EDIT:
I think I need to make a correction. I know the rhetoric also includes people like plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, electricians, technicians etc. People with vocational skills who would be okay with getting paid less than they’re worth.
My point is, there’s also tons and tons of those people in underdeveloped countries. That’s why those services are very cheap in countries like turkey for example because there’s so many people who are skilled in these.
Yet I never hear those kind of people going to Germany which I know for a fact that they wouldn’t blink an eye if they were given an offer even if the salary was barely above minimum wage because that’s still a huge difference in quality of life.
…………………………………………………
For at least 10 years now we’ve been hearing from news that "Germany calls for workers", "Germany needs skilled immigrants"etc.. When there’s 3.000.000 unemployed people as of 2026 in the country.
I know the rhetoric that goes like they need minimum wage workers that the Germans don’t want to do, then why not just take in non-skilled workers like they did in the 60s, I bet millions of people around non developed parts of the world would love to come from their even shittier minimum wage jobs in their own countries. But no, you cannot immigrate to Germany as a Lidl cashier, you cannot immigrate as a warehouse worker. No, you need to be a skilled person with a degree AND you need to find your own sponsor company, AND you need to know German.
What’s the point of just letting these news out if you’re not gonna just take in people easily?
I personally get so frustrated because I have so many people I know back in my country who wants to come to Germany but cannot because of these barriers. It’s just giving false hope to people, it almost feels like they are just having fun with people’s hopes.
Can someone please give a reasonable explanation why they keep doing this WITHOUT saying uninteresting stuff like they’re incompetent or whatever. There’s an agenda here but I just can’t figure it out and have yet to find an answer.
Here is a very recent example of the kind of news I’m referring to:
Can someone please explain why we STILL hear that Germany needs workers when it's obviously a lie?
byu/weatherkicksass ingermany
Posted by weatherkicksass
33 Comments
Needing workers is not the same as needing any workers. There are skills required.
Germany needs lots of workers, but its not the popular college educated ones.
No matter how low wages go, employers still want them to go lower.
Germany needs workers that work unpleasant jobs for crappy salaries. That has always been the case.
But raising salaries to make the jobs attractive for locals does not come to mind.
brooo german need worker for 16 euro pro hour, they dont need worker who have master degree and look for over 25 euro pro hour
Maybe read the article, there is no IT people mentionend but hard working jobs like butcher and carpenter which noone wants to do here
One of the “explanations” I got is that the current demographic has more retired pension taking people than tax paying workers. So there needs to be more of taxpayers to fund pensioners. And because the current young people aren’t having kids at the same rate as the generations before us, there’s an even lesser number of future generations for the current generation to have enough pension by the time they retire. So the solution to all of this is migration. Get in more workers who will pay more taxes so the social security system remains functional.
(Don’t yell at me, this is just one of the things I heard someone say.) However I don’t understand how the jobs will magically appear.
Well we need workers. But like nurses, doctors, pharmacist and Not thousand data analysts
Germany doesn’t need minimum-wage workers or university-educated workers. What Germany needs is skilled workers such as electricians, plumbers, nurses, etc. Basically jobs which need an Ausbildung.
Germany DOES need skilled workers, but not any
skilled workers. There are already plenty of IT & marketing specialists here. What Germany needs are nurses, electricians, plumbers. They are too skilled professions, just not the ones many are thinking about. Skilled does not equal Master’s degree
If you’re a nurse or old age home worker, you’ll be welcomed with open arms because nobody here wants to work crazy hours for crappy pay. That’s the kind of work they’re looking for. I guess if you know C1/C2, you can also try training for teaching positions and you’ll still be in high demand. But it’s the same issue. Underpaid profession.
However, anything tech related is saturated as fuck.
I think the biggest problem is the language barrier. Most of these so called skilled jobs require language skills. Additionally, they need a lot of people in nursing care. Germany is among one of the top 5 countries with most old people and they need nursing care for them and that can’t be done with non German skills. Lastly, they want cheap labor but can’t let go off their stubborn immigration policies.
We need workers in very, very specific fields (mostly because the conditions suck and it’s not the sort of job everyone can or will do and they don’t want to pay more or improve the conditions).
The agenda is to keep on going as “we” always have in a world that’s changing rapidly. The agenda is to keep wages in country low. The agenda is to plaster over large, glaring issues with fresh bodies instead of fixing the issues. The agenda is to get keep their political offices – the necessary changes would be deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people, so they think that whoever makes them will not be elected again (to be fair, they’re probably right).
You’re imagining things as one country making decisions. It’s not. One hand is trying to move in foreigners, because the age distribution of our population is a slow moving catastrophe and that’s how they’re trying to fix it. The other hand is trying to get rid of foreigners and discourage them (mostly the asylum seekers, which are the hardest to get rid of or discourage for obvious reasons).
The end result of trying to do that simultaneously looks, to put it mildly, insane and incompetent.
Germany needs w o r k e r s . Craftsmen and women, blue collar jobs and care workers that is meant with skilled workers.
Not academics and self-taught IT people or more marketing.
“WHeN iT’s oBViOUalY a LiE”
I worked three digits (105 or so, not a lot into three digits, but still, three digits it was) overtime last year because we were short . In a field where a newly trained skilled professional (no university degree needed, Mittlere Reife at the age of 16 and an Ausbildung) at the age of 20 can earn 3.3 K gross per month from month number one in their carreer as full-time employee plus extra retirement fund payed completely by the public employer.
Obviously, the most important skill here is: Language skills. But we were very much willing to compromise with that in the past in my field and we will have to continue to do so in the future, even though it is very much vital.
I am sick and tired of people in overcrowded, underdemanded fields believing only because they are competing with thousands of others for the same hundreds of jobs who are all just as un-exceptional as each other that there is a lack of skilled workers.
Whenever you wait for an appointement **anywhere** longer than you thought, for every time a service takes longer than you wished for, remember, the skilled workers shortage is a lie. Small shops and trades around you going bust? Certainly not because there are literally not enough people doing the job. And so on, and so forth.
Uff, whoo, off my chest it went. But to be honest, you own link disproves your slightly conspiratorial conclusion, doesn’t it? It clearly states that people come to Germany to start apprantaceships, so they do exactly what you claim they cant’, don’t they? And it also states that there are more and more skilled worker’s visa for Indians. So also the opposite of what you state, no? The article does state the opposite of your conclusion that people are just playing with foreigners’ hopes, doesn’t it?
>
>There’s an agenda here but I just can’t figure it out and have yet to find an answer.
The agenda is that well-paid office workers are not that much in demand but instead of realizing that a whole lot of the economy, espescially the more basic and fundamental one that everybody is in need, as in: they need it in their daily lives, is mostly not working in offices and that they may be the outlier, they cry “Conspiracy”.
>
>Yet I never hear those kind of people going to Germany which I know for a fact that they wouldn’t blink an eye if they were given an offer even if the salary was barely above minimum wage because that’s still a huge difference in quality of life.
The article you posted literally tells you the stories of some of these people.
my wife and many in our social circle came to Germany as immigrants by simply applyong for an Ausbildung. They all got one without much trouble at all, and none of them ever became unemployed, as far as I know.
Her workplace os desperately looking dor new Azubis every year, and if they are lucky they get more than one applicant, for five open positions. Every year. And it’s the same in every workplace. Every restaurant, every hotel, every electrician, plumber, tilelayer, painter, every public transportation company, every administrative office, **EVERYONE** is telling us they are experiencing a severe labor shortage.
Oh, but no, a redditor who went to university, didn’t do anything but sit in a lecture hall for six years, and doesn’t even speak German, doesn’t find a job, therefore the same labor shortage, that every single developed country in the world agrees is the greatest challenge of the 21st century, with labor becoming *the* most critical ressource of the world, must be a lie.
You are hearing what you want to hear.
Harsh reality is: Germany needs skilled workers in certain professions like nurses, care workers, craftsman. What Germany does not need is more data analysts, computer scientists or marketing specialists that cant speak German.
It’s not about needing unskilled workers or another software engineer.
Germany needs much more craftspeople who are skilled in their craft and willing to do it.
For most young Germans, a career in crafts isn’t a good career choice, as for someone who wants to “do something with machines”, the pay is double if the graduate as an engineer instead of taking an equally-long apprenticeship to become the guy who actually assembles the machine. This problem exists in all industries and that’s it: Germany needs more workers with different skills, who are highly skilled but are willing to work for an unskilled-labourer’s pay.
We dont need more workers, but the rich ruling class needs a poor underclass to extort labor from. They know how exploitative and awful it is so they try to disguise it as being woke/progressive by bringing in the “we need people from other cultures” angle
Because they do, they just don’t need the seven trillionth CV for a CS related job, how difficult is that to understand?
There’s many things that are needed, but they require hands on work like plumbing, electric, masonry, healthcare. Not game design, IT, AI, and data analysts
People that have learned a trade like electrician and people working in health care with enough German to communicate with people in Germany speaking German is what’s needed.
Not the 5th million IT dude/ dudess with an A2 in German.
Recruiting is a numbers game. The more „talent“ you „attract“, the cheaper you get the „best“ for your „exciting opportunity“
As a doctor, i can tell you that there is a lot of need in some specialties. I applied to so many hospitals and all of them called me back and wanted me to start ASAP
Missinterpretation of cheap labour
The article mentions which professions are facing a shortage because young people in Germany don’t want to do the strenuous apprenticeships in them:- bricklayers, carpenters, butchers and bakers.
As for why they don’t make it easier for them to enter, again that’s exactly what the article is saying – that they’re changing laws to allow for easier immigration to fill these roles. Of course they’re not going to remove all their checks and controls completely, it’ll be a gradual process if they find it a net positive, which is what the article says they’re trying.
So what are you complaining about exactly? Did you even read the article past the headline lol
Germany does need “skilled workers”. The problem is that most people don’t understand that “skilled workers” means people willing to work for minimum wage.
Because we do. But we need nurses and doctors and daycare teachers, and most of all craftspeople. Like, exactly the opposite of what writes on here day to day.
I’d like to comment but there are too many shit ppl commenting so I keep ”read-only” mode
Probably, It’s that same talking points that we hear in Portugal. “Companies need skilled workers, it’s so hard to hire new people”. What the media and those companies don’t tell you, is that companies don’t want to pay a fair wage, and when candidates laugh in their face when they find out they want to pay them peanuts…out comes the “nobody wants to work these days…new generations are so lazy, etc.”
I get it Germany doesn’t need more IT workers. But those employed in IT are getting fat paychecks. Make it make sense to me.
This topic comes up here at least twice a month. Germany insists on German-speaking professionals with German training and education, and until that mindset changes, nothing will shift in this field. My wife attended German classes alongside a nurse who had worked in an ICU back home—arguably the highest level a nurse can reach. Yet here, she had to restart basic training, being taught by nurses with less experience than her years on the job. I understand that nurses should speak German, but requiring C1 level, as many job offers do, seems excessive. The same applies to plumbers, electricians, and others. Yes, Germany has strict regulations and rules, yada yada. But honestly, do people really think a trained electrician from abroad will endanger lives by wiring bathroom taps or burn down a house just because the rules differ slightly from their country? Physics is the same everywhere. Another reason – make these skilled professions a bit more attractive for the young folks by paying them properly. They will come. I see the shift in younger generations towards so called blue-colar jobs. They see already that the office-aimed studies are not a guarantee for easy life and full pockets. But it takes time.
Germany needs electricians, nurses, drivers, and construction workers — not IT specialists. It’s not 2015
It is scam, a false-flag operation. They did this 20 years ago too, with engineers in the automotive industry. Check out Peter Hartz, a former Volkswagen manager, who also designed the infamous Hartz IV social welfare system here in Germany. He even wrote a book about it – he explains it pretty well and doesn’t hide anything.
Back then you would’ve been told, that the engineering sector, especially in the automotive sector, desperately needs more engineers – and so many young people chose to study in that field. This was everywhere – in the news, at schools, in TV and radio, etc.
But it wasn’t true. Because at that time, engineers became rare and their salaries went through the roof. Some of the best paid jobs in the 2000s. To counter that trend, Peter came up with the idea, to artifically create an “inflation of engineers”, to make their salaries go down considerably. So they advertised this career and claimed everywhere, that young people should study in this field. At the same time they created a new welfare system, to force people to work for really low salaries and scare everyone else to ever get into such a situation.
So many people finished their studies, just to find out, that salaries were going down. Drastically. And that there actually was no shortage of engineers anymore. Not so much with Volkswagen itself – you can’t claim that these guys ever got paid too little – but with all of their supply chain partners. You don’t want a job as an engineer for a salary, barely more than a cashier in a supermarket? No problem – there are hundereds of others just like you waiting outside.
And now they want the same thing to happen to well paid programmers, computer experts, etc. They’re too expensive. We want an over-supply of the market, an inflation, so that they can hire these guys in numbers for minimum wage.