On 8/28/2010 12:07 AM, michael perelman wrote:
> "Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has hailed Germany's "job
> miracle" after whittling the jobless rate down to 7.6% of the work
> force, compared with unemployment levels of about 10% in the U.S. and
> France. But the bulk of that reduction has come from the emergence of
> part-time jobs, often at low pay. That helps explain why German
> domestic demand has remained sluggish even as German exporters boast
> booming foreign orders.
I think there are separate issues here. On "part-time workers": There's been a sharp increase in part-time and insecure work - bad jobs - since the SPD's "reforms" in the late 90's. Separately, there's been a big rise in workers on short time since the start of this recession as a result of the work-sharing policy. This doesn't (to my knowledge) have anything to do with bad jobs per se, just workers on short time instead of full time, to avoid layoffs. Then there's the issue of wages, which involves the union and employer federations deliberately shifting the entire wage scale downward to maintain demand at the expense of foreign economies. The first issue is bad but not new; the second and third are new but I think not necessarily bad except for the beggar-thy-neighbor aspect of the wage policies.
SA