The Hartz IV Story

N-TV (commercial German news network) brought up an interesting story with statistics this morning....over German welfare (Hartz IV).

Over the past decade, when you carve off all of the numbers....roughly 18.2 million Germans at some point....got welfare benefits in Germany.....some maybe for a couple of weeks....some for the entire period.

It's a fair sized number....out of 82-million in population, that almost one in every four Germans had to consume welfare for some period of time.

This came out of a request that the Linke Party made to the government, and it had to be stated in public.

For kids under fifteen years old....5.5-million were in this group.

Right now for current numbers?  It's almost six million Germans on Hartz IV.  It's roughly 80-percent which were capable of working but beyond unemployment compensation (4.26 million). 

All of this number business leads German leadership to discussions over ways to move more of the crowd to jobs.  It's a discussion that goes in circles and rarely shows any results.  Right now, the Labor Ministry talks about a group of long-term unemployed (near 900,000 in number) where these people have more than a year of no work.  The major factors?  It comes around to three curious things:

1.  A fair number of the long-term unemployed have no real certifiable skill areas (they missed their chance in their youth, showed no real enthusiasm, or just didn't have the aptitude for the job-craft).

2.  Stumbling through a job or two (or three) and getting a bad attitude, with no confidence.

3.  Living in areas where there is no real job opportunity. 

Being an outsider, I look at the left's political orientation on this and their desire to 'fix' the problem.  It would be a great achievement if they could move 300,000 of the long-term unemployed off the current welfare 'trend'.  But you would have to coach these people to a great extent....force some of them to move a fair distance (maybe over 500 kilometers)....and entice a number of companies to take greater than average chances on people with attitudes.

I sat last year looking at a business report....talking over a town in Bavaria of 30,000 residents.  The town had an unemployment rate of roughly two-percent, and was practically begging for youth-applicants for craft-training jobs, and on any given day....had at least three-hundred jobs that were begging for workers.  It would make sense to discuss moving options with people in the northwest of Germany who need some fresh start and find the funds to move them all the way into Bavaria.  The odds of being able to talk folks into this?  Remote.....Germans just aren't the type for moving and starting a new life.

The odds of this Hartz IV thing being a top three political topic for the next four years?  Very high.  Most political folks prefer it....instead of migration or immigration, even though it's not fixable and would require vast amounts of money to show any changes.