Shortage of skilled workers: How to score points in the tug of war for skilled workers

Governments around the world are trying almost desperately to attract skilled workers to their countries.

The worldwide lack of well-trained and experienced employees leads to losses in productivity.

It also threatens to trigger a downward spiral in investments.

Berlin is working flat out on less bureaucratic access for trained foreigners.

At the other end of the world, in the immigration country of Australia, there is a feverish search for solutions.

And the wealthy city-state of Singapore is pushing ahead to attract the best of the best to the island.

Christopher Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia/Pacific based in Singapore.

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The current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, had already promised a “summit for full employment” during his time in opposition – but this has been achieved given an unemployment rate of 3.4 percent.

The value is the lowest level in 48 years.

That is why a summit is now being held to collect ideas for reorganizing the Australian labor market.

142 representatives of Australian society, politicians, trade unionists, company bosses and association representatives selected by the government are meeting in Canberra until today, Friday.

A good 67 percent of those of working age in Australia are employed or looking for a job – that too is a record.

However, 53 percent of the companies state that they cannot fill all the positions.

This means that Australia has around 430,000 job vacancies.

Immigration to counter skills shortages

Managers and unions are now pushing to raise the annual immigration rate from 160,000 to 200,000.

But even that will hardly help in the short term: 600,000 guest workers with temporary visas had left Australia during the pandemic.

There are many hurdles to overcome: the traditionally strong trade unionists are tying their approval to the demand that the minimum wage for guest workers with fixed-term contracts be almost doubled from AUD 53,900 to an astronomical AUD 92,000 (EUR 62,931).

Employers agree to raise to A$60,000.

At the same time, trade unionists want companies to be obliged to continue training a local worker for every trained guest worker.

Before more immigrants are allowed into the country, there must also be wage increases for everyone to make employment more attractive.

Albanese itself would like permanent immigration instead of a higher quota of temporary guest workers.

At least the government now wants to extend visas for foreign university graduates in Australia from two to four years - this increases the chance that they will be tied to the fifth continent forever.

As in Germany, issuing visas in Australia is currently demanding: almost one million applications are blocking the authorities' files.

60,000 of the applications come from foreign professionals.

Germany should learn a lesson

In Germany, too, an acceleration of the processes is overdue: Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil and Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (both SPD) have already outlined that skilled workers will soon be able to enter the country and work even if their professional qualifications are not yet recognized in Germany, but they have professional experience and a have an employment contract.

Because the baby boomers will soon be retiring, the shortage of employees in the German economy is likely to worsen.

Here, too, immigration remains: "The big lever is migration," says Herbert Brücker, researcher at the Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research (IAB), which belongs to the Federal Employment Agency.

Without any immigration, the potential of the labor force in Germany will shrink sharply by 2060, even if women and older people work significantly more.

With a net immigration of around 400,000 people per year, however, it would be possible to keep the number constant.

The institute considers net immigration of around 100,000 people a year to be realistic in the long term.

For comparison: Australia is planning twice as large, although it has just under 26 million people, while a good 83 million live in Germany.

The workers are there

Like the huge continent of Australia, small Singapore is also struggling with the realignment of its immigration: Due to its extremely restrictive visa policy, including for skilled workers, the rich small state has lost a lot of its reputation among foreign investors in recent years - German companies also complained desperately that they were being extremely had been made more difficult to bring experts from Germany to the island.

In the future, Singapore wants to issue a five-year visa to foreign top executives if they earn more than 30,000 Singapore dollars (21,411 euros) a month.

Their partners should also be given the right to seek employment.

Among other things, this should lead to foreign investors paying their best expatriates higher.

Exceptional candidates from sports, art, science and teaching should also be allowed to enter the country for a limited period under a special scheme.

Theoretically, there are enough potential workers available around the world.

Example India: There, 955,000 people applied for 3,000 temporary jobs in the navy.

India is not able to accommodate its one million school leavers every month.

A contributing factor is that although foreign investments were very high at around 21 billion dollars in the past financial year, the factories are extremely automated.

German companies report that they have to train Indian university graduates for about two years after their engineering studies until their skills correspond to those of an engineer trained in Germany.