And German industry in general. They couldn’t laugh off Tesla. Now the punches are coming in hot and heavy.
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German Industrial Job Losses Top 80,000 With Daimler Cuts – Germany’s economy may have narrowly avoided a recession, but the pressure on the country’s industry shows no sign of abating.
Daimler AG said this week it will shed 10% of management positions at its Mercedes unit, lifting the tally of job cuts announced this year across Germany’s manufacturing sector to more than 80,000, according to Bloomberg calculations.
Companies from Volkswagen AG to Siemens AG are letting workers go as Germany’s powerful automotive industry struggles with a shift toward electrification and self-driving cars, and makers of machinery and robots are hit by slower exports and trade disputes. Makers of well-known German products such as Meissen porcelain and WMF kitchenware are also trimming their workforce.
Right? At least that’s what I’ve been reading in the German media for manyyears now.
But some things you just can’t ignore away. And times change, or something. Looks to me like the German automobile industry just ain’t what she used to be.
Elon Musk’s German Factory Started With Love Letter From Berlin – Musk is taking his fight for the future of transport into the heartland of the combustion engine, where the established players long laughed off Tesla as an upstart on feeble financial footing that couldn’t compete with their rich engineering heritage. But Musk has captured the imagination of the think-different consumer, putting pressure on the Germans to respond.
“We definitely need to move faster than the airport.”
To everything turn, turn, turn
There is a season turn, turn, turn
A time to buid up
A time to break down…
Germany’s wind power industry could shed about 40% of its jobs because of sliding interest among investors to build turbines on land, threatening a key driver of the nation’s ambitious clean energy targets.
Environmental rules are snagging license approval for scores of onshore projects, causing delays of as long as two years, according to a report by Psephos GmbH for Germany’s VDMA machine makers lobby group. As developers and investors shy away from auctions and wading through the thicket of red tape, construction of new parks is grinding to a halt and putting jobs in jeopardy.
Deutschland ist weltweit Vorreiter bei der Energiewende – dem Umstieg auf erneuerbare Energien. Doch ausgerechnet im wichtigsten Erneuerbaren-Bereich im deutschen Markt gibt es große Probleme.
Although the plural form would be more accurate these days. It’s the latest big thing in Germany. Everybody’s doing it – or in the process of planning it (see German automobile industry).
Take the Deutsche Bank, for instance. Give me 18,000 employees to go. The times they are a changin’.
Up to 20,000 jobs could be axed at Deutsche Bank in a radical reorganisation of Germany’s biggest bank.
The investment bank is expected to be particularly hard hit, with many of the cuts set to affect London and New York.
“I can assure you: we’re prepared to make tough cutbacks.”
The German government is not expecting widespread job cuts in Europe’s largest economy following Airbus’s decision to scrap production of the A380 superjumbo, the aerospace policy coordinator told Reuters on Thursday.
“We expect these jobs will largely continue to exist, working on different models such as the A350, the newest plane on the market, or the A330 neo.”
Is the most outrageous kind of outrage there is around here. Take this one: Outrage about the unacceptably high number of temp employment contracts in Germany today. We’ll see to it that these poor people get real jobs!
Fine. Run with it. So that’s why the SPD is making such a big noise about alleviating this scourge as soon as the next GroKo (with SPD participation) is finally in power.
The only dumb thing here is that they wouldn’t have to wait that long if they didn’t want to. It turns out that the folks over at the SPD-run Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, for instance, have hired way too many of these poor defenseless temp employees themselves. They’re not willing to give these people permanent contracts, however. This is because… Because why anyway? And there we have it again, folks: The SPD redistributor world vs. the real finite resources world.
Die SPD hat im Koalitionsvertrag einen Kompromiss zu sachgrundlosen Befristungen ausgehandelt. Tatsächlich ist die Praxis aber auch in Bundesministerien gängig.
Concerned about the traditional German angst about sozialer Abstieg (personal social decline) is currently at an all-time low, a number of German angst experts are recommending that radical options be considered when next month’s election rolls around.
“We could all vote for the SPD, for instance,” said one less than thoroughly angst-filled social worker, with a stress on social. “That would bring my angst about social decline shooting back to appropriate levels in no time. I’m not sure if I’m quite ready for the Left party yet, though. I do have heart problems, after all.”
Die Wirtschaft wächst – und die Deutschen fühlen sich so sicher wie seit fast drei Jahrzehnten nicht. Laut einer Erhebung der Universität Leipzig hat nur noch jeder Dritte Abstiegsängste.
PS: To help folks combat their angst about not having enough angst, somebody has introduced Donald Trump ecstasy pills over here. They are guaranteed to stick in any German throat that tries to swallow them, however.
A new study has determined that Germany not only has the lowest birth rate in Europe, it has the lowest birth rate on Planet Earth itself. In the past five years Germany has managed to produce a less than whopping 8.3 children per 1000 inhabitants. That edges the country past the previous Japanese champions who apparently couldn’t keep their hands off each other during the same period and now squeeze out some 8.4 children per 1000 inhabitants.
But what’s this with these .3 and .4 kids, gals?
Meanwhile, in an unrelated story… Another study indicates that Germany will face a massive labor deficit by the year 2030. In a mere 15 years, that is, between 6.1 and 7.8 million workers will be missing in the country.
And it could get worse. Large sections of the German population just disappear out of nowhere here from time to time, too.
Danach wurden in den vergangenen fünf Jahren im Durchschnitt 8,3 Kinder je 1000 Einwohner geboren. Das liegt unter dem Niveau des bisherigen Schlusslichts Japan von 8,4 Kindern je 1000 Einwohner.
In Germany? Wow, that’s a real shocker. Who would have expected that?
Maybe they’ve been applying at the wrong places, though. This radical Salifist dude here had no trouble getting a job working in the highly sensitive baggage handling section at Düsseldorf Airport, for instance. Despite having an intensive security check done on him first, I mean.
Think positive, folks. You can do it. You just have to get out there and show a little private initiative, I always say.
Der 27-Jährige wird zum Umfeld des deutschen Salafisten Sven Lau gerechnet. Er soll zu jenen Männern gehören, die Anfang September in Wuppertal als “Scharia-Polizei” aufgetreten waren.
PS: “The best thing in sports, period: Game 7.” Go Giants!
That’s strange because 56 percent of Germans would prefer to work abroad (and 35 percent of those would like to work in the United States).
Germany is the number one non-English speaking destination for migrant workers, according to a global study. It ranked as the fourth most popular place to work abroad globally, after the US, UK and Canada respectively. One third of the 200,000 respondents surveyed said they’d like to move to the country.
“German jobseekers don’t necessarily associate going abroad with getting a better job offer or more money. Germans are much more likely than workers elsewhere to say that interesting job content and challenging work assignments are important to them.”
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