One way to look at Germany, I guess

Yesterday, I read two articles on globeandmail.com about Germany that kept me wondering on how Canada looks at Germany (knowing that these where only two possible perspectives). I have to say, I found both articles pretty, what, naive? Badly researched? A nice gesture for Angela Merkel´s conservative government?

First, Doug Saunders take on how well Germany dealt with the financial crisis - especially compared to other European states. The article is a bit older, from August I think, I just only saw it yesterday.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/broken-europe/hope-germanys-secret-to-recovery/article1659177/

In a sense he is right about the one fact that the government managed to save a good amount of jobs in certain sectors of industry by simply paying a big share of the employees salaries. As the few examples shown say, people were happy that they could keep their jobs, even on a Kurzarbeit- a part-time basis. But here lies the first crucial point that Saunders forgot to mention: people were happy to keep their underpayed jobs because they knew they would not find a new one elsewhere. Especially all he blue-collars over fifty that had been with their company trough most of their working career. The situation for well-experienced workers over fifty on the German job-market is more or less hopeless and they all knew that.
The second point Saunders is not filling to put his finger on is the simple fact that none of these jobs is an investment into the future. As soon as the state will stop funding those jobs, they will vanish and with them what little hope the people on these jobs had. And none of these jobs will ever be a full-time employment again. So, the average worker deals with the fact that he or she can either be unemployed and on social welfare until retirement age or work for half the money and barely above the margin of subsistence for the next two decades.
The German production industry, especially the automotive sector, has been in trouble long before the financial crisis. Like in the United States of America, the inquiry on the market has been constantly declining. Saving those jobs is an act of good will for the single worker but also a show a Germany´s incapability to design a labor market fitting the demands of the 21st century. Hence, the government - and there was a big debate on the point of all these measures, let us keep this in mind, too - as invested highly into the past and not the slightest bit into the future.

And the 7% unemployment rate is a nice little illusion. If you take all the jobs like the above mentioned, where the state pays salaries in sectors that are nowhere the states responsibility, if you take all the 1-Euro-jobs provided by the national agency for employment where the jobholders still receive social welfare to survive, if you take all the jobs where people have to rely on the state in order to survive because their income is above the minimum income needed to exist, if you take all the internships, trainee-ships and voluntary services that academics with a PhD degree do on a regular basis, if you take all these jobs out of the statistics, Germany´s unemployment rate would hit 20 percent. That is the future perspective, unfortunately.

The second article, published yesterday, was actually a bit hilarious because of its clear black-and-white perspective. Dealing with current research on how Canadians are effected by increasing stress levels at work, the German "example" should show that Canadians are all whiny and don´t have the right attitude towards work - unlike the Germans.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/work-life-balance/part-4-harder-worker-no-life-just-act-more-like-the-germans/article1783415/

It is true, Germany has the 38.5 hour week. On paper. Most people work more and for less money, since extra-hours are only rarely paid. And especially in the private sector, somebody who is employed on a 38.5 basis costs less than somebody on a 50 hours week. Yes, there is such a thing as a very protected work environment with companies that have strong Trade Unions. Those are mostly non-profit organizations or old, well established companies. But the ideal conditions the authors points out is a memory from the fairy-tale-land that Germany maybe was in the 1970s, with full employment and a booming economy that gave the Trade Unions a big deal of liberty to ask for anything. Today, as the article above shows, people simply fear for their job and therefore except any condition. There is the many supermarket chains for example that don´t even allow their employees to form or join a union. Their is the many, many middle class companies with less than eight employees that are nowhere politically represented - unlike their bosses.

According to recent research, every third German faces depression, burn-out, allergies and other stress-related illnesses due to the rising pressure at work. A lot of people wish they could downsize and some actually do. Alternative living arrangements, sabbaticals, time off work become more and more common.

Yes, Germans are very industrious and efficient which means that a higher outcome of everyday´s work is expected. It doesn´t mean that people can drop their pens everyday at four o-clock. Yes, Germans value work and career and it is a big part of our culture and self-esteem. But that does not mean that people don´t have their boundaries and take off to work singing and whistling like the seven dwarfs every day when there is another 14-hour-day ahead.

The picture of the hard-working German robot is another myth form a century long gone.