Our industry is far from the only one where recruiting workers from abroad is being touted as a way to tackle Germany’s skills shortage. The trouble is, nobody seems to realise that treating the symptoms will only get you so far while the causes are still there.
How do you get that across?
Germany has a problem
I’m hardly the only one saying that Germany’s skills shortage starts at the very top, with the government. They seem to have noticed the shortage in the country at large. There’s a serious one in politics itself, though. Very few of them have completed vocational training or finished a degree.
And there they are, telling us what to do, thanks to their advisers. Anyway, skilled workers are already thin on the ground. Judging by the proposals coming from politicians, there won’t be any in future either.
Writing to politicians
Last week I wrote to a few politicians about the skills shortage and put the issues facing our industry to them. I used a letter Udo Skoppeck had posted on Facebook as a template. I looked up my region’s representatives in Berlin on Abgeordnetenwatch , found their email addresses on the party websites and wrote to them.
So far I’ve had two replies, one from Dirk Wiese of the SPD and one from Friedrich Merz’s CDU office in Meschede. Mr Wiese was the only one who seemed familiar with the issue. Unlike the woman who replied on Mr Merz’s behalf, he could at least tell me that the Bundestag’s Transport Committee was working on it.
I already knew that, of course, as I’d mentioned it on Facebook. What bothers me is that they seem intent on lowering the standard of vocational qualifications here as well. Plenty of people say the initial qualification is enough for our job. I did mine in six months too, but then I sat the full professional driver exam. I mean the exam you take after the three-year apprenticeship. The Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) exam people take now didn’t exist in 2004. I was only eligible because I’d already been in the job for six years, driving a 7.5-tonne lorry with a tandem trailer on domestic long-haul routes since the mid-1990s.
The CDU reply sounded like hot air to me. I saw little interest in giving skilled workers the training their trade deserves. As I said earlier, plenty of drivers also subscribe to the view that the initial qualification is enough.
I may be putting my foot in it again with some people, but I think that’s short-sighted.
The initial qualification is enough to drive. What about later on, if further qualifications ever come along? I still maintain that the three-year apprenticeship goes into much greater depth about the job and everything that comes with it. That became clear when I took the professional driver exam. I passed because I already knew things that the initial qualification hadn’t taught me and because I keep learning on my own.
Back to the shortage. Whatever you read about it, the first solution put in front of you is immigration. It’s treated as indispensable, as though there were no way to manage without it.
To my mind, that deals with the symptoms and leaves the causes intact. I haven’t read a single report that seriously asks why we have a skills shortage in the first place. Instead they consult leading ‘experts’ in the sector, and every one of them wants immigration. There was already talk of bringing in skilled workers from abroad when large numbers of asylum seekers arrived in Europe.
We’re still a long way from that, and bringing workers in from abroad won’t improve things by itself. One day they’ll decide they’re fed up with working themselves into the ground for this lot too.
Tackling the causes of the shortage
Young people rarely choose professional driving these days. Other jobs pay better than haulage and logistics, and the, er, work–life balance is poor. It’s harder to fit the job around a family than it is in other lines of work.
That’s hardly surprising when you start while everyone else is asleep and are still working after others have clocked off and gone home to spend the evening with friends or family. It’s quite normal to be away from home for 15 or 16 hours a day, or for a week or two at a stretch. The pay is a long way short of what you need for a decent living in Germany.
Yes, dear politicians, I know what your figures say. That’s largely because the sources are flawed, or at least because the data is being misread.
Many people don’t realise that Mrs Merkel’s claim that the average German earns €3,000 comes from politicians using sites such as https://www.nettolohn.de
for their data. Those sites can’t tell whether you actually earn the gross salary you enter or just want to see what you’d take home on that figure.
There are still firms in our industry paying long-haul drivers a flat €2,000. That’s hardly a sign they value the work.
As long as we keep treating the symptoms, the skills shortage will be there. Even the best lorry in the world won’t help then.
