German here. There is no labor shortage, just a shortage of decent job offerings because lo behold employers are stingy.
As an American, how do I sign up to work in Germany? Practically speaking, not just the “official” way.
Well really the only step is to get hired in the first place, then you can request residence based on that.
But it’s next to impossible to get hired as someone outside of the EU/Single Market unless you have many years (3-5 probably) of experience in a highly in-demand field/specialization, usually STEM stuff especially anything in tech or engineering, but also medical jobs since most EU countries put an artificial restriction on the amount of doctors that can be produced – in fact, because of this, western European countries tend to import loads of doctors from eastern European countries and Cuba which often don’t have these restrictions and can produce many excess doctors. Keep in mind though medical professionals that, due to those artificial caps on doctors (which were created as a way to restrict supply and maintain the high status/prestige and pay of being a doctor) you usually have extremely long hours and are overworked to hell, with relatively poor working conditions, but I imagine it’s still way better than in the US (which also has those artificial caps) for most who aren’t top surgeons since at least the EU has worker protection laws lol.
I imagine trades are also highly valued by the government seeing as Europe has a critical shortage of people working in trades, due to the governments neglecting them, refusing to do much to value them, leading them to have worse pay and conditions than white-collar jobs. Why go through all the bullshit that is working a trade in the EU and just get underpaid and mistreated, when you can instead get 2x the pay and benefits of working an office job? So that’s also probably doable.
I mean yes, that too, but there actually is a labor shortage as well. We have 2.7M unemployed people and 700k open positions (source).
However, we need to account for
a) unemployed people that are not able to work due to illness etc b) those 700k open positions are only the ones that are reported to our labor agency (Arbeitsagentur).
If you account for that, we probably have closer to 2M open positions.
Imho 2M open positions makes more sense as there about 100k open positions in child care (Kita) alone.
However, we need to account for
a) unemployed people that are not able to work
Not sure how it works there, but I believe in the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t count people unable to work in their “unemployed persons” numbers.
Like…a 3 month old infant isn’t considered “unemployed” for statistical purposes, for example.
But there wouldn’t be a shortage if those jobs would pay decent wages and offer tolerable working conditions, or pay tolerable wages with decent working conditions.
Also there is many people who came as refugees and want to work, but they are prohibited form doing so.
That is at least in the next few years. With all the boomers retiring the economy is going to get fucked either way.
