What if you offered 3000 jobs in a place with 15% unemployment and nobody applied?

This is about as off-topic as can be, but I thought this was an interesting article from the Chemnitzer Morgenpost entitled “Why doesn’t anybody here want to work?” (Check out the Google-translated version of the article; it gets the point across pretty well.)

The setting: Leipzig, a large city in the part of today’s Germany which previously belonged to communist East Germany. Unemployment in Leipzig, as reported just 2 weeks ago, is 14.8%. Unemployment among men is at 16%. The total count of unemployed persons is 37,600. Of those, 14,500 are “long-time unemployed” (Langzeitarbeitslose). [source]

The problem: Amazon already employs about 900 people in Leipzig, but they need another 3000 for the holiday season and they began trying to fill these positions as early as August. So far only 500 people have applied.

So the Chemnitzer Morgenpost is wondering, why won’t anybody work? Why don’t they take the jobs available to them? They posit that fear or worry about the physical activity involved with these particular jobs is probably one reason why people are staying away from them. I’m not sure how much these unemployed people on the “Hartz IV” program get per month, but the Amazon jobs are offering them 1200 EUR. So let’s say that the the difference between unemployment compensation and the income from the Amazon jobs is not that much … would you rather stay at home and get the money without having to walk 12 to 13 kilometers per day (which is estimated by Amazon for these jobs), or would you go perform relatively (and certainly comparatively!) strenuous work for not much more money? (I like to think I would still choose the work…)

I’m assuming that there is no problem acquiring knowledge of these jobs. In “social states” like Germany (and Austria, where I live), most unemployed people (I believe) really do go to the government unemployment agency (rather than, say, scour the newspaper classifieds everyday), and I don’t think that there is any doubt that the agencies in Leipzig are showing these jobs to their unemployed clients.

The lack of interest in these jobs seems particularly depressing when we consider the fact that a full 27,000 of these 37,000 unemployed are under 55 years of age, so we would expect that they probably could, with some exceptions of course, do these jobs.

Interesting and kinda depressing.

Now it’s back to work for me…

Till next post,

Bill

P.S. That image accompanying this post is the logo of the German federal unemployment agency.

P.P.S. Thanks to tweeter LeipzigMeldet for bring the article to my attention.

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