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.

I’m in the process of, shall we say, “rehabilitating my online presence.”  I’ve begun that process by blogging about a topic in which I have great interest: German and Austrian history. Rather than blog here about it, I chose to get a new domain.  The result is German History Buzz.  Forgive me for the name, dear Austrians, but be assured that I blog about Austrian history just about as much as I do about your big neighbor to the north.

I also tweet more with my @GermanHistory Twitter account than I do with the @BillDawson account, in case you’re interested in tuning in.

All is not lost for BillDawson.com; he shall be resurrected by more regular postings quite soon.

I’ve earned my keep for several years using Microsoft-only products, yet for the past three years the contagious excitement of the open-source community has infected me.  It was about that time that I started using Linux exclusively at home.  Wanting to tinker and dig deep, I actually started with Linux from Scratch.   At first it seems like a ridiculous project, since you begin by simply copying, pasting and running the commands they give you to setup the chroot environment, build the tool chain, etc.  But of course the point is to do a little research and learn about the commands and what they’re doing.

Like most people, I didn’t stay with Linux from Scratch (I think I built X and then decided that was good enough.)  I wanted to continue tinkering, but not quite to that extreme, so I moved on to Gentoo.  Gentoo ran my home desktop for at least a full year.  You would think that if I stuck by it so long then I would also be willing to recommend it.  But it was a love-hate relationship and I’m 100% certain that I will never return to it.  Gentoo certainly is a tinkerer’s distribution and I learned a lot about Linux while using it.  But unfortunately the tinkering usually has a negative source — the failure of one of the Gentoo “ebuilds” — and therefore you tend not to feel too happy while tinkering with Gentoo.

The quick and ambitious nature of the Ubuntu project eliminated a lot of the reasons for sticking with Gentoo.  People liked Gentoo because they could get fresher builds of popular packages than they would have gotten from binary distributions like Fedora or Debian.  But Ubuntu pushed pretty hard and fast and started getting newer stuff into their releases faster than most other distributions had traditionally done.  So I gave Ubuntu a shot, and for about two years it has been my home desktop.

Having settled on a distribution, I began messing around with deeper stuff like programming in Linux.  It was fun working through the GNU C samples in the free book Advanced Linux Programming.  It was fun leveraging my MSFT-centric knowledge when playing with the mono project, including getting my one really, really, really tiny patch committed to Banshee (ah, what a big moment that was).  But it has been very fun getting to know Python and Django.

And with that remark I can finally return to the original point: my desire to begin blogging is related to my desire to re-focus my career in a direction which, I hope, includes open-source languages and frameworks like Python and Django.  I no longer wish to just play with open-source at night; I would rather it turn into my bread-and-butter.  For that to happen, I need to focus on these technologies more consistently.  Knowing that a blog is there waiting for me to put my learning experiences “on paper” will help me achieve that focus.

And so here I am, blogging again.