The salaries of executives and specialists have risen significantly faster than the general average earnings in recent years.

For some time now, however, the earnings of unskilled workers have also been increasing at a faster pace.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

The reason for this is the statutory minimum wage, which drives up wages for simple jobs regardless of supply and demand.

This is shown by a new analysis by the state development bank KfW based on the official income statistics.

It is available to the FAZ in advance.

Overall, the following applies: "Higher qualifications and promotion to management positions are still best suited to earning high incomes." With a view to the growing influence of legal regulations on the earnings structure, however, she also gives a warning: "If the incentives to qualify and bear the costs of a course of study or company training, then sufficiently large salary differences must remain.”

Lower midfield performs worst

If you look at wage increases over the past decade, those employees who are in the lower midfield in terms of qualifications and wage levels do the worst.

They work above the minimum wage, but not yet in areas in which the interaction of professional specialization and labor shortages acts as an automatic wage driver.

This becomes clear with a comparison that divides the employees into five performance groups and shows the development of gross earnings for these: In the top performance group - i.e. managers and specialists - there was an increase of 26.9 percent in the period from 2010 to 2020 .

The average for all employees was 23.4 percent and in the lowest group, that of unskilled workers, 18.4 percent.

However, the increase in the second-lowest group was even lower at 16.5 percent.

These are employees without a certified professional qualification, but who have some experience in their job.

Central minimum wage in the lowest wage group

"The minimum wage plays a central role in the development of income in the lowest wage group," confirms KfW chief economist Fritzi Köhler-Geib.

She shows this with the introduction of the minimum wage in 2015: four million workers who previously earned less than 8.50 euros an hour would have experienced wage increases of an average of 14 percent as a result.

Average wages for the economy as a whole rose by just 2.7 percent in the same year.

This was followed by no further push of this kind through the minimum wage.

In the near future, however, there will be an even stronger one due to decisions by the traffic light coalition: With the planned increase to 12 euros on October 1, 2022, the minimum wage will be 25 percent higher than a year earlier.

Converted to full calendar years, according to Köhler-Geib, there will be an increase of 10 percent this year and a further 14 percent in 2023. The German Council of Economic Experts expects wage increases of 2.5 and 4.4 percent for the economy as a whole.

The absolute levels of earnings staggered in the past year as follows: In the group of executives and top executives, the average full-time salary was 8562 euros gross per month.

The average across all groups was 4514 euros, and unskilled workers came to 2459 euros.

In the second lowest group, that of the semi-skilled, there were 2908.

In addition to qualifications and professional experience, the industry is also important.

It is true that not everything can be foreseen when choosing a career, but those who are technically at home where things are going well overall are better off.

According to the KfW, three areas with an average increase in earnings of more than 40 percent at all qualification levels stood out in the past decade: research and development, information services and processing of stone and earth.

There was growth of more than 35 percent in nursing homes, guard and security services, civil engineering and temporary work.

The author of the study, Martin Müller, sees the findings as confirmation that a good education and qualification policy is the most important lever for alleviating the shortage of skilled workers and increasing income.

"We have to do what is necessary to do this, also to eliminate deficits in the field of digital education." According to his analysis, the tax and levy system has at least no obvious structural problem: the net earnings of the five performance groups are much closer together than gross, but noticeable differences remain.

According to Müller's model calculation, the lowest performance group gives an average of a good 30 percent of the gross amount to public coffers, the top one a little more than 40 percent.