This story came out over the weekend, and ARD (public TV, Channel One) did a decent job of introducing it.
The German Association of Officials and the Civil Service Federation (dbb) both spoke to this topic.....they've got empty positions and are having trouble recruiting or hiring.
Right now across all of Germany....for the civil service type jobs, there's 300,000 empty slots. Nationally, 40,000 nurses are missing. Then you have 25,000 federal and state police positions which are empty. And on top of that, 138,000 local administrative slots across Germany are empty.
Just in the tax collection offices nationally.....21,000 seats are empty.
The retirement window over the next decade? Over a million civil workers will retire, and you have to wonder about the replacement cycle.
The obvious thing that wasn't spoken about in this story? If the seat is empty.....they aren't paying the salary. You can do the math here, but there is a fair sum of savings that exists....as long as you keep the seat empty.
So what is the real story here? I would suggest two stories lay at the heart of the issue.
First, a lot of these jobs are no longer the type that people really desire. It's like discussing the nursing field in Germany, the lack of respect, and the stress put upon those members. You could walk into a room of 16-year old kids, and try to recruit them for the field.....only to find that they just aren't that interested. Same way for the German police.
Second, could you even go and recruit non-Germans for the jobs? In nursing, there's potential. But could you go and recruit 500 Mexican guys to go and learn the German language and then go through two years of police-study.....to become German cops? I have my doubts.
What happens by 2025, when you get up to around 500,000 civil service jobs empty?
4 comments:
This is a product of focusing purely on profit. In nursing, for the last 20-30 years whenever someone had been off sick for several weeks they weren't replaced by a temp. Then the other nurses in that station all dug deep to get through the tough few weeks. Management then decided that since they managed to get through those few weeks with one less staff member, then they didn't really need that person. Then they'd reorganise the roster and pat themselves on the back for the savings they'd made. They created an epidemic of overworked and therefore sick and injured nurses. Then they come at the end of the year and say that the hostilities didn't make enough money and that everyone will have to help out in other areas over the next year. No accountability for the mismanagement that actually lost the money. Just more hard work for the poor front line carers, who should be treated as the most important part of the place.
To some degree, I agree. But the police don't work with 'temps' (same for the fire department, garbage folks, the city hall folks, or the tax-office).
In the case of German nurses....it is fairly messed up and to the point that recruitment in Mexico or the Philippines is now considered 'normal'. It won't surprise me if we arrive in 2030, and twenty-percent of all nurses in German hospitals are Mexican.
Which is simply a case of stealing qualified workers away from other lands because they'll tolerate shit conditions of employment.
So rather than actually improve the working conditions to attract more Germans to the profession they cry out that German's won't do these jobs and use it as an excuse to bring in people who will.
In complete agreement about the police. A bit difficult to fix staffing issues there. My friend married a German police officer and they had a lot of interesting things to say on the matter. The sort of things that would have her labelled 'radical and dangerous' by the political classes here.
On the police, if they did profiling and social media reviews on the whole police force of Germany....more than 90-percent would be classified as far-right-wing. And I'd even suggest that of the fire department folks as well. It'd be awful hard to find some extreme left-wing policeman existing today. Cops over the age of 50 will tell you...disrespect is something that simply didn't exist much in the 1980s....but today, it's almost a weekly thing that they run into some event.
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