recruitment
Giffey and Schwarz promote training in trades
“Crafts have golden soil, that’s truer today than ever,” says Berlin’s Mayor Franziska Giffey
© Wolfgang Kumm / DPA
Franziska Giffey is now beating the drum for craft trades. Because at the start of the new training year, thousands of apprenticeship positions remained vacant in Berlin companies.
Berlin’s Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey and Economics Senator Stephan Schwarz have campaigned for training in the trades. From a total of 15,000 training places across Berlin, more than 7,000 are still vacant this summer, and many are still free, especially in the craft trades, said Giffey on Tuesday during a joint visit to the training building yard in Berlin-Marienfelde. When choosing a career, the craft deserves more attention. Now is the right time to make that decision.
Franziska Giffey herself a craftsman’s child
“Crafts have golden soil, which is truer today than ever,” said Giffey, herself a craftsman’s child, as she emphasized. She then had the opportunity to demonstrate her manual skills – it must be so much fun – in front of master craftsmen and trainees in Marienfelde several times: gluing on a tile or paving, for example. And she also hammered a nail into the wooden beam with precise blows of the hammer.
The shortage of skilled workers is enormous, especially in the construction industry, said Giffey. The average of 20,000 new apartments per year, which the Senate wants to build in Berlin, cannot be created if there is a lack of young people in the trades. “We can write down many great goals. If we don’t have the people who really build, it won’t succeed,” explained the SPD politician. “Just like climate protection doesn’t work if you don’t have the energy technicians and construction electricians. That’s why I think it’s extremely important that we support the trades.”
Economics Senator Schwarz (independent) added that trades are traditional, but at the same time extremely modern and increasingly important in view of climate change: Anyone who wants to do something for the climate change, for the protection of nature and the planet, is right in the building trade .
Craft trades are crisis-proof
Schwarz also referred to the job prospects: “If you look at the next few years, we will always have a huge need for tradesmen,” said the senator. Skilled trades are absolutely crisis-proof. “It wasn’t always like that. We also had a lot of unemployed craftsmen in the 80s. But that won’t happen in the next few years.” Anyone who has completed training in a craft should not be afraid of unemployment – on the contrary, it is the best insurance against it.
One of the reinforced concrete construction trainees accused the Senate of having sold state-owned apartments at bargain prices. Today, rents for people like him are hardly affordable. On the other hand, far too little is being invested in social housing, he criticized. Giffey pointed out that the apartment sales in question were way ahead of their time and assured that red-green-red would do more for affordable housing.
On a tour through Berlin, Giffey and Schwarz found out about training opportunities in the trades, in the training building yard in Marienfelde, for example, about the work of concrete workers, tilers and plasterers. The program then included a visit to an organic bakery in Charlottenburg and to a building technology company in Kaulsdorf that specializes in the installation of solar systems.