German workers more upbeat than West Midlanders
“It means that you work less hours and you get less in wages but you are not lost and the company doesn’t lose your competencies and qualifications.
“And it means you don’t lose your qualifications and you don’t have to work as a taxi driver when you were an engineer and four years later you will have forgotten everything and won’t have a job any more.”
Mr Boomgaarden compared Germany’s experience in this recession to the last economic downturn caused by the dot-com crisis when there was no short-time working scheme in place.
“When the dot-com crisis came some years ago it was used much less and many companies later were desperate to find qualified personnel when the boom came again,” he said.
“This time they learned from this and said ‘we don’t want to lose our qualified personnel, we will try to keep them under the scheme’.
“At the moment exports are picking up again and we are better in our competitiveness – it’s really working.”
As well as helping thousands of workers avoid the dole queue, short-time working has had the secondary effect of keeping consumption buoyant in Germany, the ambassador said.
Mood among consumers remains more upbeat and people are more willing to commit to bigger purchases if they don’t feel anxious about losing their job, a situation which many in the country believe helped far more than the UK’s VAT-based approach.
Mr Boomgaarden said: “There is one very important thing that consumption in this crisis didn’t really fall.
“Job security is a factor which drives consumption much more than any VAT or tax reduction.
“If you have job security, even if it’s because of short-time working which means the company will employ you full-time again as soon as they have better sales, you will have better consumption.”
But Bernard Casey, principal research fellow and specialist in the German labour market at Warwick Institute for Employment Research, said there were concerns both inside Germany and abroad that short time working was just “putting off the inevitable” and shying away from addressing the real long-term problems in the labour market.
“A lot of people tend to find the grass is greener on other sides of hills,” he said.
“Is there really a temporary short-term problem here or is there actually something rather fundamental? If there is, then we have to confront what is fundamental.
“It puts off the inevitable. You can see this particularly in the motor industry where there is vast over-capacity. You can argue that keeping plant A, B or C alive doesn’t overcome the problem of vast over-capacity and at some stage these plants are going to have to close.
“We are pretending that they are not by pumping money into them. I think that’s a very big problem.”
