There’s a demographic crisis in every EU country. There’s a shortage of people across Europe. So Germany can’t just attract other EU citizens and drain the other member states of their population.
The “crisis”, is that they all want cheaper workers, not that their particular workers aren’t cheaper than their neighbors. It’s a race to the bottom. If there’s a shortage of workers, their wages rise, and people are interested in their jobs but then they would have to cut the profits.
Germany can and has attracted other EU citizens. They want cheaper. Butchers’ shop and “critical skilled” are oxymorons. The Indians coming into Germany are working for the big shops and factories, not opening their own. It is a shift towards a migrant laborer based economies while those that own the actual assets get rich for relatively little effort, like with housing and the shift from owning to renting. The gap just keeps getting bigger.
You seem genuinely unaware that countries like Germany legitimately have less than replacement birth rates. I don’t discount your point about paying people more, but I can acknowledge both these realities and you can too. While the class struggle with billionaires rages on, there actually are real demographic challenges.
The reason people are also having less children is precisely because of the way quality of life is tanking.People aren’t suddenly less able to reproduce, they just don’t want to go race to the bottom to have children. Rather than allowing societies time to adjust and compensate for these changes, people in their governments are forcing the race to the bottom.
The immigrants coming for these jobs are willing to drop their quality of life and make sacrifices like renting shared living spaces and having to work under worse conditions. Once we are at the bottom, the same problem will happen, just with lowered standards. This ends up making the “developing” countries balance out with the “developed” ones, which wouldn’t be so bad if the politics didn’t tank as a net loss. It’s always requires more effort to to build up a healthy political environment than to take it down.
Yes yes, I know you see everything through the lens of the disappearing middle class narrative.
But you’re unarmed with the basics. Agrarian societies run on family farms, where human hands mean more output. Developing countries have absolutely shit standards of living but they have the most kids. This is in direct contradiction to the way you see things.
The reason more developed countries have fewer children is because in a more advanced economy, workers need to be more educated and trained to produce value. They don’t begin contributing to the economy at age 5. More like 18 or 21. That is expensive. Nothing to do with boomers tanking the economy. This is fundamental and true around the world.
Don’t get so attached to a narrative that you become blind to everything else.
Funny how you end that last comment, given what it is … And funny how parting from such a class based obsession, you twist the argument back to the default that’s served to get us to ignore reality. Your argument isn’t anything new, it is what we are fed up with.
The first affected by this are the people who don’t have job mobility or wealth. Those are farms, and by “family farms” I I assume you mean the big corporate land owners who end up buying them. These are migrant workers. Their conditions also go to the bottom - they have more ready access to social services but their wealth and acquisition power is the first to be affected.
They are the ones who are already at the bottom, and are seeing their quality of life tank first. Housing, the economy, they are the first to have to adapt their standards to those of the migrants coming in to perform those jobs. They have to say goodbye to things like the family “farm” and homes you so romanticize and their best hope is to at least be able to use the advantage to move into urban jobs, not because they are more educated but because they pay better. They are the first stuck with “owning nothing” and coming to terms with it.
Same story for the large meat processing companies in Germany who need more butchers and the jobs they displace, except that now it makes it harder for those at the bottom to move into jobs like them. Was it something you were considering because as a migrant farmer your life was going to shit with the increasing cost of living? Not a choice anymore. I laugh at the notion that anyone could consider these “middle class”, but then again you just regurgitate the same old. It doesn’t have to be with the lowest paid jobs, either, this has been going on with the tech industry to great effect for years. This has resulted in countries that really don’t have any control of where their own technology sector is heading off to but rather one that belongs to one of a few international corporations keeping the cycle going.
Migrant farmers and workers have it worse than ever, unless they are coming from far worse economies, I find your argument laughable at best. Maybe the reason you are so blind is because you’ve already accepted working at age 5 and shit standards as a norm. Meanwhile, governments become increasingly corrupt and the increasing wealth gap between the leaders and the lowest rung of society is only praised by comments like yours.
Sure bit the fact that you require both partners to work and if you have kids the cost of daycare is astronomical. You cannot say that these do not contribute to lower birth rates.
The fact that Germany has attracted people from other EU countries in the past does not mean it will be able to do so forever.
The problem of underpaid labor can be solved by increasing oversight of businesses and punishing employers who exploit these people, because the crime is exploitation, not accepting appalling working conditions because one has no other choice.
In Italy, there are many Indians who own their own businesses, such as electronics stores or restaurants—to name the most common ones. It seems strange to me that in Germany they are only employees and not business owners.
It’s true that they probably will not start their own butcher’s shop. Then again, what do Germans need?
Most want affordable meat, which requires cheap labor. They want affordable houses, which requires cheap construction workers. They want affordable logistics and shipping, which requires cheap personnel.
These jobs are never going to get a top loan because that would cause inflation for everyone. And most Germans aren’t even motivated to work there even if the wages were good, because the work is hard/irregular/dirty.
Western European countries have always needed foreign workers, many of which have become part of our society such as the people from Turkey that came here decades ago.
If Germany wants to continue without their foreign workers they would be immediately having around 8 million vacancies even by removing the people who don’t have a citizenship yet. Germany has one of the most aging populations in the world, there’s not a chance those vacancies will be filled without foreign workers.
There’s a demographic crisis in every EU country. There’s a shortage of people across Europe. So Germany can’t just attract other EU citizens and drain the other member states of their population.
The “crisis”, is that they all want cheaper workers, not that their particular workers aren’t cheaper than their neighbors. It’s a race to the bottom. If there’s a shortage of workers, their wages rise, and people are interested in their jobs but then they would have to cut the profits.
Germany can and has attracted other EU citizens. They want cheaper. Butchers’ shop and “critical skilled” are oxymorons. The Indians coming into Germany are working for the big shops and factories, not opening their own. It is a shift towards a migrant laborer based economies while those that own the actual assets get rich for relatively little effort, like with housing and the shift from owning to renting. The gap just keeps getting bigger.
You seem genuinely unaware that countries like Germany legitimately have less than replacement birth rates. I don’t discount your point about paying people more, but I can acknowledge both these realities and you can too. While the class struggle with billionaires rages on, there actually are real demographic challenges.
People can’t afford kids.
The reason people are also having less children is precisely because of the way quality of life is tanking.People aren’t suddenly less able to reproduce, they just don’t want to go race to the bottom to have children. Rather than allowing societies time to adjust and compensate for these changes, people in their governments are forcing the race to the bottom.
The immigrants coming for these jobs are willing to drop their quality of life and make sacrifices like renting shared living spaces and having to work under worse conditions. Once we are at the bottom, the same problem will happen, just with lowered standards. This ends up making the “developing” countries balance out with the “developed” ones, which wouldn’t be so bad if the politics didn’t tank as a net loss. It’s always requires more effort to to build up a healthy political environment than to take it down.
Yes yes, I know you see everything through the lens of the disappearing middle class narrative.
But you’re unarmed with the basics. Agrarian societies run on family farms, where human hands mean more output. Developing countries have absolutely shit standards of living but they have the most kids. This is in direct contradiction to the way you see things.
The reason more developed countries have fewer children is because in a more advanced economy, workers need to be more educated and trained to produce value. They don’t begin contributing to the economy at age 5. More like 18 or 21. That is expensive. Nothing to do with boomers tanking the economy. This is fundamental and true around the world.
Don’t get so attached to a narrative that you become blind to everything else.
Funny how you end that last comment, given what it is … And funny how parting from such a class based obsession, you twist the argument back to the default that’s served to get us to ignore reality. Your argument isn’t anything new, it is what we are fed up with.
The first affected by this are the people who don’t have job mobility or wealth. Those are farms, and by “family farms” I I assume you mean the big corporate land owners who end up buying them. These are migrant workers. Their conditions also go to the bottom - they have more ready access to social services but their wealth and acquisition power is the first to be affected.
They are the ones who are already at the bottom, and are seeing their quality of life tank first. Housing, the economy, they are the first to have to adapt their standards to those of the migrants coming in to perform those jobs. They have to say goodbye to things like the family “farm” and homes you so romanticize and their best hope is to at least be able to use the advantage to move into urban jobs, not because they are more educated but because they pay better. They are the first stuck with “owning nothing” and coming to terms with it.
Same story for the large meat processing companies in Germany who need more butchers and the jobs they displace, except that now it makes it harder for those at the bottom to move into jobs like them. Was it something you were considering because as a migrant farmer your life was going to shit with the increasing cost of living? Not a choice anymore. I laugh at the notion that anyone could consider these “middle class”, but then again you just regurgitate the same old. It doesn’t have to be with the lowest paid jobs, either, this has been going on with the tech industry to great effect for years. This has resulted in countries that really don’t have any control of where their own technology sector is heading off to but rather one that belongs to one of a few international corporations keeping the cycle going.
Migrant farmers and workers have it worse than ever, unless they are coming from far worse economies, I find your argument laughable at best. Maybe the reason you are so blind is because you’ve already accepted working at age 5 and shit standards as a norm. Meanwhile, governments become increasingly corrupt and the increasing wealth gap between the leaders and the lowest rung of society is only praised by comments like yours.
Birth rates decline as societies develop out of pure agrarianism, by virtue of the fact that unskilled farm labor is no longer as valuable.
If anyone else wants to hear a whole song and dance sideshow to this, see the above. 👆
Sure bit the fact that you require both partners to work and if you have kids the cost of daycare is astronomical. You cannot say that these do not contribute to lower birth rates.
The fact that Germany has attracted people from other EU countries in the past does not mean it will be able to do so forever.
The problem of underpaid labor can be solved by increasing oversight of businesses and punishing employers who exploit these people, because the crime is exploitation, not accepting appalling working conditions because one has no other choice.
In Italy, there are many Indians who own their own businesses, such as electronics stores or restaurants—to name the most common ones. It seems strange to me that in Germany they are only employees and not business owners.
It’s true that they probably will not start their own butcher’s shop. Then again, what do Germans need? Most want affordable meat, which requires cheap labor. They want affordable houses, which requires cheap construction workers. They want affordable logistics and shipping, which requires cheap personnel.
These jobs are never going to get a top loan because that would cause inflation for everyone. And most Germans aren’t even motivated to work there even if the wages were good, because the work is hard/irregular/dirty.
Western European countries have always needed foreign workers, many of which have become part of our society such as the people from Turkey that came here decades ago. If Germany wants to continue without their foreign workers they would be immediately having around 8 million vacancies even by removing the people who don’t have a citizenship yet. Germany has one of the most aging populations in the world, there’s not a chance those vacancies will be filled without foreign workers.