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EUROPE | FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 5 |
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Not Just a French Disease By JORDAN BONFANTE /BONN
In that event, Germany's political parties as well as its labor officials had better brace themselves. In December, Germany experienced another spurt of unemployment, to a record 4.5 million, or 11.8%. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to scrap a grandiose year-old pledge--what Germans call a flowering landscape promise--to cut unemployment in half by year 2000. "That goal is now certainly not achievable," Kohl admitted at a leadership meeting of his Christian Democratic Union. "But I am holding on to a goal of cutting unemployment as fast as possible." Scoffed Klaus Zwickel, head of the powerful I.G. Metall Union: "Big slogans with nothing behind them." Now local officials like Mahlmann, who live close to the siege every day, are predicting a possible further rise to 4.9 million. At that point, with the needle perilously close to a psychologically dramatic threshold of 5 million, the political pressure could be strong enough to jeopardize Kohl's chances in parliamentary elections in September. (A poll last week by the Allenbach Institute showed the opposition Social Democratic Party leading Kohl's coalition of his cdu and its Bavarian sister party by a gap of 39% to 33%. Kohl himself is falling behind both potential sdp candidates in the popularity ratings. Gerhard Schroeder leads by 55% to Kohl's 29% and Oskar Lafontaine is ahead by 44% to 38%.) Kohl has overcome negative polls in the past, but two facets of the current job malady are proving resistant to traditional political vaccines. For one thing, Germany in terms of unemployment remains a divided country. In West Germany, joblessness has nearly bottomed out at 9.9%, but in former East Germany--despite $83 billion a year in rebuilding subsidies--it has continued to worsen to the current 19.8%. More confounding still, unemployment is persisting in the midst of respectable economic growth, of about 2.5%. Germany would seem to be mimicking the "jobless growth" that the U.S. experienced during its massive industrial restructuring in the 1980s. German heavy industry, especially in carmaking and other export sectors, has been roaring forward. But because of the high cost of shedding workers, employers choose to boost production by investing in machines and only a meager number of new hirings. Last week, for example, Opel joined the downsizing trend by announcing a three-year reduction of 4,000 of the 25,000 auto workers at its big Russelsheim plant near Frankfurt. Restructuring may pay off one day. in increased competitiveness. But given the German economy's bias toward capital investment and against hiring, a leaner and meaner industrial base may not dent unemployment. In the U.S., growth as low as 1.5% triggers job creation; Germany needs nearly twice that pace without creating many more jobs. "Only when growth rises faster than productivity," says Federal Labor Office president Bernhard Jagoda, "will new jobs be created." No one is forecasting that kind of performance any time soon. --By Jordan Bonfante/Bonn
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he scourge of unemployment is not confined to France, in one
Berlin district, jobless workers, many of them from the building
trades, sullenly queue to collect their monthly dole payment.
They are closed-mouthed and don't even mention France's recent
spate of labor-office invasions--a practice unheard of in
Germany. Yet the ranks of German jobless keep growing, along
with the risk of social unrest. "Where six months ago we had
5,000 out-of-work people come in every month, now we have
6,000," says Uwe Mahlmann, a Berlin district official. "And I
fear we're going to get even more next month, because
traditionally January is the month when the most workers,
especially construction workers, are thrown out of their jobs."