Challenge for job centers: why millions of people don’t work

Employment is at a record level, while 5.7 million people are receiving basic social security. And workers are often urgently needed. How does that fit together – and what role do the job centers play?

The suspension railway rattles along its rails over the Wupper. The office of Thomas Lenz, head of the Wuppertal job center, is less than 20 meters away. From the fifth floor he has an overview of the city – and its job market. About every seventh person in Wuppertal receives benefits from the job center. Employees are being sought in the café next door, as well as in the doctor’s office across the street. Why can’t the many people from basic social security just start there directly?

Job center as a social authority

80 percent of the people who are cared for by the job center have not completed school or completed vocational training, says Lenz. About 60 percent have massive psychological or other health restrictions: “We have clients here with drug problems, high debts, and war trauma. Before we can start finding work or training, we first try to solve these problems – and albeit very individual.”

You take care of the people who have already written off everyone else. Today, the job centers are primarily social authorities. “With their work, the job centers make a significant contribution to social peace in the cities and communities. Long-term unemployment makes people ill and excludes those affected from society,” explains Lenz. Until now, job centers have often placed unemployed people in helper jobs, which they then did not do for long. As part of the newly introduced citizen’s allowance, further training and the acquisition of a professional qualification are to be given greater priority.

livelihood on their own

Labor market economist Holger Schäfer from the German Economic Institute agrees. “The aim of social policy is to enable people to make a living from their own resources,” says Schäfer. “They usually achieve this through work, so integration into the labor market is of crucial importance for participation and personal responsibility.”

But how do you reach people with basic security? You have to look at the numbers differently. “Of the 5.7 million recipients of basic security, only some are unemployed, namely around 1.7 million,” says Schäfer. “The rest are either children or young people who are still in school, or people who look after small children and are not available for the labor market, or workers who receive top-up benefits.”

There is no patent recipe for reducing unemployment. A certain level of search unemployment is also normal. In fact, only a few people who are eligible for the first job market remain on basic security. From this, Schäfer concludes: “The present and, above all, the future labor shortage can only be remedied through immigration, higher labor force participation, longer working hours and higher productivity”.

Vacancies cannot be filled

According to a recent survey by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, more than half of the companies in Germany cannot fill all vacancies. Never before have so many companies had problems recruiting new employees. “In the coming years, the baby boomers will reach retirement age,” says Schäfer. “Compensating for the resulting gap through immigration is of central importance, since it is probably already too late for other measures aimed at long-term behavioral changes.”

So that the job market remains robust and more people come into the job market, the head of the Wuppertal job center calls for the deeper causes to be addressed. “Without schooling, the path to the labor market is more than difficult,” says Lenz. “Don’t we have to reform our school system? Don’t we also have to talk about fair wages and the value of work in our society?” It is high time that something changed fundamentally.