Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2012 as a news piece during the euro crisis. The jobseeker figures are for June 2012, and the employment figures compare May 2011 with May 2012.
The ECB is threatening to lower the wages of people in work. The outlook for economic growth is getting more complicated, even in Germany, which is starting to see its exports suffer because of European countries in serious trouble, such as Spain and Italy.
However, today’s news is that the number of Spaniards looking for work in Germany has risen by more than 10%. Almost 8,000 Spaniards (7,970) looked for a job there last June. Not for nothing, back in May we reported on the demand for workers in Germany over the next three years.
While the number of German jobseekers fell, applications from Spain, Greece and Portugal rose. Greece reached 4.1% and Portugal 0.2%.
Spaniards in Germany
An estimated 46,026 Spaniards were working in Angela Merkel’s country in May, 11.5% more than a year earlier. Greek workers in Germany were the group that grew the most between May 2011 and May 2012, by 9.8% to 117,744 people. The number of Portuguese rose 5.9% to 55,560, and the number of Italians 4.2% to 232,772.
Germany offers good prospects of a decent job to well-trained workers from these countries, where the labour market is especially tough. Even so, in the overall count of foreign workers in Germany, Spain accounts for 0.1% of the total, compared with 0.7% for Italians, 0.3% for Greeks and 0.2% for Portuguese.
Featured image: Erdumlauf, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
