A company in the suburbs of Munich. Towing systems for cars are produced here for customers all over the world. Order books are filled with orders worth millions. But George The owner of the company, Tokmakidis, is desperate. Because it can’t deliver.

Reason: staff missing for months. Before Corona it had around thirty employees, now there are only ten. He tried everything to find new employees. He gave lectures at the employment office, postings, vocational high schools, in vain.

A question that Josefa Schreindl also asked himself. The 32-year-old is the junior manager of a grocery store in Schaftlach, Upper Bavaria. The business has existed for a hundred years and is managed by the fourth generation. How much longer?

He is looking for new replacements for his female employees who have been retired for months. But it’s just a shower of rejections. Nobody wants to work on the weekend. According to our regular customer Eva Gassl, the situation is the same everywhere: “Everyone is desperately looking for staff, whether in the cafe, the butcher’s or the hairdresser’s.”

In fact, 1.8 million jobs are currently unfilled, including 50,000 vacancies in the hospitality industry alone. baby? No. Josefa Schreindl says nobody wants to work in a trade anymore, today everybody wants to study.

Questioning in a high school graduation class at the vocational school in Rosenheim: Students are between 19 and 22 years old. All have already completed an apprenticeship. But no one wants to work in the profession they learned.

Lennard Kolbe studied carpentry. According to the 19-year-old boy, he liked the job itself. But in addition to the low salary, further education opportunities are also scarce. Mechatronics engineer Colin Mack says 40 years in the same job is not for him. For 20-year-old electronics technician Andreas Quitt, one thing is certain:

Stefan Schellenberger is the principal of the school. Companies urgently need to rethink to attract young talent. Some companies are still stuck in old structures where the boss has sole say. But that time is over. No offspring can be won this way.

Wilfried Hüntelmann, head of the Munich employment agency, can only confirm this. The job market is empty. Rarely have there been as many working people in this country as they are today. And rarely have there been so many vacancies and so few job seekers. As a result, employees can choose which professions, under which conditions and with which employer they want to work.

But in addition to the current shortage of workers, there is also the threat of demographic change. Labor researcher Professor Enzo Weber of the Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research predicts that when baby boomers retire, the German labor market will shrink by seven million workers by 2035.

According to Weber, in order to close this gap, the elderly and women had to be recruited into working life. And Germany would have to rely on immigration and very good integration.

Entrepreneur Tokmakidis wishes he was that easy. He had to close his workplace for months during the corona process. Most of his employees in Hungary and the Czech Republic went home at the time and never came back. Because in their home country, profitability is higher for them due to lower taxes, rents and additional costs.

Tokmakidis says he can’t blame them either. Because he is playing with the idea of ​​moving production abroad and running only a small office in Germany. Bad news for Germany as a workplace.