INSM Campaign Full Employment Tower in Berlin
This May, only 2.960.000 persons were unemployed in Germany. The number thus dropped below the three million mark which makes the current estimate the best May reading since 20 years. Unfortunately, however, the federal agency for labor and trade associations also declared that more and more sectors and regions are lacking skilled labor. The INSM has built a full employment tower in Berlin to symbolize what would happen if the skilled labor gap is not closed as fast as possible.
„Contrary to popular belief, the lack of skilled labor is not a sign for the healthy recovery of the labor market. If anything, the shortage is becoming increasingly dangerous”, warned Hubertus Pellengahr, chief executive of the Initiative for a New Social Market Economy (INSM) today in Berlin. A schism in the labor market is looming ahead, said Pellengahr: The lack of skilled labor in technical and mathematical occupations or nursing would reinforce unemployment among those with few job qualifications. Pellengahr: “This is where the labor market forks: No skilled labor, no investments. No investments, no economic growth, no growth, no jobs – especially for the low-qualified.”
To symbolize this interaction visually the INSM has built a full employment tower in front of the federal labor ministry in Berlin today. Pellengahr: “We estimate that for every two skilled labor positions that cannot be filled, one job for the low-qualified is either endangered or not even created in the first place.”
This is why the Initiative for a New Social Market Economy demands a greater effort from the government and the social partners. The INSM demands more efforts for better professional and advanced education, fewer early school leavings and study terminations and a better integration of mothers and single parents as well as the elderly and migrants. In this, the INSM feels vindicated by the report “Paths to Full Employment” of the Hamburg Institute for the World Economy (HWWI) which was published in May 2011. According to the HWWI the lack of skilled labor is homemade, but solvable.
The initiative wants to renew the social market economy of Ludwig Erhard and adjust it to globalization, demographic change and the knowledge society. The INSM stands for a social system of freedom and responsibility.