Billions in funding are flowing into the Cottbus region to phase out lignite. This also causes problems: large-scale new settlements are depriving the local economy of skilled workers.
This is not how Lars Wertenauer had imagined the economic upswing in Lusatia. He is managing director of Metall-Form-Technik GmbH in Kolkwitz in the southeast of Brandenburg. And for several months now, he has been losing employees again and again – poached by larger, surrounding companies.
He has lost six of his former 60 employees this year alone. Some went to Deutsche Bahn, which is building an ICE maintenance facility in Cottbus. Others said goodbye to the lignite company LEAG, which says it is “working on a green future”; with solar parks and electricity storage.
Since then, the spirit of optimism has been mixed with a certain disillusionment. Wertenauer has observed this among engineers and technicians. “Employees are actively poached.” Some of the newly arrived companies even paid earnest money, as a starting bonus, so to speak. Other entrepreneurs from the region also report this.
Demographic Change strikes
The big competitors simply offer a better salary. And this despite the fact that Wertenauer pays its employees standard wages. Medium-sized businesses in Lusatia have been complaining about a shortage of skilled workers for years. The population of the region around Cottbus has been falling for years – demographic change is hitting here with full force.
In order to cushion the economic consequences of the impending coal phase-out, there are plenty of subsidies for the region: regional and municipal funding, business support and money for economic and ecological change. In plain English, this means that jobs are being created, many of them with the help of tax money.
Deutsche Bahn alone wants to employ 1,200 people in Cottbus – in a maintenance facility for ICE trains that will go into operation at the beginning of next year and run at full capacity in 2026. Employees who have to take the train from somewhere. Wertenauer says: “As a small medium-sized company, we cannot keep up with the financial strength that the railway brings.”
Headhunting after training
Wertenauer is not alone in his dissatisfaction: car dealerships in Cottbus complain that newly trained mechatronics engineers are simply being poached in droves after their apprenticeship. Until recently, there was hardly anything like this within the region. The state-financed economic recovery appears to be enormously exacerbating the shortage of skilled workers – and weakening the established middle class.
There are scientists who warned about such effects decades ago. Harald Michel from the Institute for Applied Demography in Berlin, for example. For him, the government’s windfall of money being poured out over Lusatia is just a political sign: “According to the motto: We have not given up on the region. You can already see the problems that this brings with it in a shrinking region: cannibalization.”
Lost business in Lausitz?
The problem of “cannibalization” has been known to researchers for at least 25 years. If the population is shrinking – and it is doing so in Lusatia – it is almost impossible to counteract it politically: “The pie is simply getting smaller and smaller. And if you combat the organic shrinkage with funding policies, you might induce something like artificial growth – but only regionally,” says Michel.
However, viewed across Germany as a whole, this has negative consequences. “In economic terms, this is not even a zero-sum game, but rather a minus game,” says Michel. “Investing such sums in shrinking regions means an economic loss. The funds would be invested more effectively in growing regions.”
The problem has been recognized in Lusatia – there is no solution in sight. Manuela Glühmann from the Cottbus Chamber of Commerce and Industry explains: “Of course we urge the big players to deal with this fairly, especially Deutsche Bahn and LEAG. And we also know that they are aware of their responsibility.” Statements that many entrepreneurs in Lusatia view with skepticism when it comes to poaching bonuses.
Medium-sized company Wertenauer relies on young people, as he says: “We like to train new trainees with passion.” His metal processing company has already won a training award twice. But whether the next generation stays with the company afterwards, seems more uncertain than ever.