Around 3.1 million unemployed people in Germany actually want a job.
People between the ages of 15 and 74 are not available for the labor market for various reasons, as the Federal Statistical Office explained on Friday.
They are referred to as "hidden reserves" and make up around 17 percent of all non-employed people.
Some of them are not available at short notice because they have to look after relatives, for example, or they are not actively looking for work at all because they think they cannot find a suitable job.
According to the analysis of the 2021 microcensus, the office counts almost 1.4 million people in these two groups.
That was a significant increase of 0.5 million compared to 2019, which is partly due to the consequences of the corona pandemic, but also to a change in the survey method, as an expert explained.
There is also a third group of people who are particularly remote from the labor market, who are neither looking nor available, but who expressed a general desire for work in the microcensus survey.
This is about 1.8 million people who were not previously included in the hidden reserve in Germany.