Do immigrants in Germany get the same wage as Germans or do companies use them to undercut wages like they do here.

European social safety nets may be better than they are in the US but they are being cut all over the place. Germany has been squeezing pay and benefit concessions from its workers for several years. The trend started before the recession and has picked up when that became available as an excuse.

Even legal Farm Workers in America don’t get overtime but the Government gives farmers checks. How do the Germans handle farm labor?

Why are the Germans trying to follow our failures?

Those silly Germans seem to think that people who actually do the work matter. Here we understand that it’s the owners and stockholders who matter, and that workers are disposable. Which is why Germany’s GNP is faltering and ours is doing just great… Oh, crap. I can’t even snark about this…

In Germany, machinists are respected. Maybe that’s why Germany is succeeding in a tough export climate against the rest of the world. Maybe we should try something like tha.t

Respect! Respect for the workers that create your product! What a quaint, European socialist idea!/s

Geoghegan says they are fully integrated into the unions and work councils.

Damm do they have an immigrant problem at all then in Germany?

Here’s a discussion of the position of the employer in the Mott’s apple juice strike from the New York Times:

Dr Pepper Snapple has vigorously defended its stance. “The union contends that a profitable company shouldn’t seek concessions from its workers,” the company said in a statement. “This argument ignores the fact that as a public company, Dr Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all its constituents, recognizing that a profitable business attracts investment, generates jobs and builds communities.”

The employer thinks the workers are commodities:

Tim Budd, a 24-year employee who belongs to the union’s bargaining team, said he was shocked by one thing the plant manager said during negotiations.

“He said we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down,” Mr. Budd recalled. “He said there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs, and they could hire any one of them for $14 an hour. It made me sick to have someone sit across the table and say I’m not worth the money I make.”

Whats all this American’s are more productive workers than Socialist Germans stuff then the GOPers say? Just how are the measuring productivity? By the cost of the worker and the value of the goods produced minus taxes or are they measuring things like lifespan healthcare, quality of life for everyone?

Yes the worker must obey here only the Capitalist owner can be creative in Germany they get input from everyone.
But Capitalism is more Creative? Maybe we were once but we stopped making things.

Sorry not fair America creates the most creative Ponzai schemes in the world USA! USA! USA!

Just added book to my list and since I might be unemployed again I can probably read it soon:)

And the American model works for every American.
American executive, that is.

How much do these councils help aid productivity and innovation vs similar sized and product American companies?

Its actually rural America with the falling wages and the fleeing to the cities population that is the low wage set in their ways model for American business or at least thats been my experience working on a farm this summer.

Here’s some must reading on the real Republican economic model:

cheap labor conservatives

Now Germany’s big problem is finding good engineers.

Countries that make stuff need engineers how many and what kind of interests do we have per capita vs Germany?

Wow. I hadn’t even heard about the Mott’s Dr. Pepper Snapple (remember when Snapple was young and “good?”). Jaw-dropping, well, except that it’s the logical result of the path we’ve been on for thirty years — no amount of profitability is ever enough.
“Record profits” after a year of losses – and that’s when they want to cut wages and benefits (including pensions) to match the low-wage economy around them.
That’s how the middle class was made, all right./s

I only wish they made something I could boycott….

Thank you. That sums it up in a nutshell.

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like social spending or our “safety net”. Why. Because when you’re unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you “over a barrel” and in a position to “work cheap or starve”.
Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why. These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you “over a barrel”.
Cheap-labor conservatives like “free trade”, NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are “over a barrel”, and will work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman’s right to choose. Why. Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women “over a barrel”, forcing them to work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like unions. Why. Because when labor “sticks together”, wages go up. That’s why workers unionize. Seems workers don’t like being “over a barrel”.
Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about “morality”, “virtue”, “respect for authority”, “hard work” and other “values”. Why. So they can blame your being “over a barrel” on your own “immorality”, lack of “values” and “poor choices”.
Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.

Sounds just like my soon to be ex Farm job I was lucky to get minimum wage if I was an immigrant that would be a no.
I am really thinking Farms are the models for Corporations. Models of failure production is good but waste is high if its not perfect its trash. Labor even legal well no overtime. Pay is not given according to the effort it takes to do the job farm labor’s should get paid more. Farmers need our tax dollars but because they don’t share those profits with their workers rural America is shrinking.
How do farmers make out in Germany? How do their farm workers compare to ours?

True Snapple was great then a corporation got hold of it and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen snapple in stores

US still makes stuff. I think we’re still #1 as far as total manufactured goods. China would be #2.

I’m not sure where the US is on worker productivity, but I doubt we’re below the top 5 (Germany and France were trading #1 productivity for a while in the past decade).

Germany had a nice boost for exports last quarter with the Euro losing value due to the Greek debt crisis. Lower Euro means lower cost of German products for non Euro countries.

Germany did another very good thing during the crisis – workers were able to work short hours rather than be laid off and they received part of their missing wages/salary via unemployment. Kurzarbeit pays on the order of 80% of full time wages for 50% work week. It lets workers retain skills during economic down turns.

It looks like productivity is doing great, but wages are not. We just get more work out of the smaller number of employees. I took a quick look, and didn’t see a breakout of the difference between industrial productivity and productivity in service industries.

The top income tax rate in Germany is 45%. In Holland it is 52%. What is it in the U. S.? End of story!

I read an article by this author on Alternet.org a few weeks ago. It was fascinating, and enlightening. Highly recommend seeing if it’s still on their site. The Germans are light years ahead of us when it comes to work, and a few other things! Seems like a very sensible existence. They also have great HC, social bennies for parents, etc.

Wonder what their immigration rules are! LOL I took German in high school.

I heard about this on NPR. Doesn’t quite fit with the GOP’s “conventional wisdom”. Germany prides itself on making things that last. It’s against the law to do that here. The economy would collapse.

I haven’t bought an American car in 30 years. Do they really make them better now? The cars I buy have to last 10 years.

And herein is where most people miss the point.

Yes, European countries have high taxes – higher than here that’s for sure.

But what if you figured out how much in dollars that is for an individual taxpayer in Germany – say 45% of a $45,000 salary equals $20,250. Right here is why all of the US taxpayers freak out.

But how about if we take that same US taxpayer making $45,000. And here in the us the top rate is 35% which equals $15,750. (I am not taking any deductions right now which would reduce the tax burden somewhat) In addition, the US taxpayer pays 6.2% for Social Security plus 1.45% for Medicare plus 1% for State Disability for another 8.65% of taxes. This brings the total tax burden for the US taxpayer to 43.65% or a total of $19,642.00.

Then we need to add $12,000 for the cost of an individual health care insurance policy (that’s free in Germany) plus the deductibles and co-pays for that same health care (that’s free in Germany). Then we need to add the cost of child care if this person has a little one – at an average of $500 per month or $6,000. (That’s free in Germany – and child care there is much better than here) Then our worker here gets a maximum of two weeks of paid vacation while the German counterpart gets one month paid.

For that $45,000 salary, the US worker is putting in an average of 52.5 hours per week, while the German counterpart works an average of 38 hours per week.

The US worker has a baby. They get 6 weeks of unpaid leave to take care of the baby. But only if they work for a company with more than 50 workers. If not, too bad. And this is only for the mother.

In Germany, the mom gets 6 months off with pay. And then the dad can take off 6 months with pay. And this applies to everyone – not just those working for large corporations.

So…..we pay almost the same amount in taxes and we actually pay more by paying for our own health insurance and child care and maternity leave. And unemployment benefits. And the Europeans are bad…wrong…what?

Seems like we need to back up and tak a more realistic look at exactly just what the Europeans actually get for their high taxes. And take a look at the real bill for the same basket of services that our government could provide – but doesn’t because the GOP keeps screaming that our government can’t do anything right. Well, the VA system works pretty well. And so does Medicare – except for the Part D and that’s the Rethugs fault too.

health care insurance policy (that’s free in Germany)

No, it’s 14.9% from the first 3’750 euro you earn in a month.

say 45% of a $45,000 salary

USD 45.000 is roughly 35’000 euro, if I insert that in my tax calculator I get:

income: 35’000 euro
——– minus taxes:
income tax: -5’487.00 euro
solidarity tax: -301.77 euro
——– minus obligatory social security:
public pensions fund: -3’482.50 euro
unemployment insurance: -490,00 euro
public health insurance: 2’765.00 euro
public nursing care insurance: 428.75 euro
——–
income after taxes and social security: 22’044.98 euro ~ USD 28’389.52

So the tax and SS burden for USD 45’000 in Germany is roughly USD 16’600, that would be an overall burden of ~37%.

I’m living in Germany now (at least until after the war crimes trials in the US). My favorite ‘find’ about Germany? They ran WALMART out of the country for trying to pull the same kind of abusive commercialism they pull in the US. Google it for a laugh.

Enjoy.

Reading this post is like one of those “Amsterdam Kids” skits from Conan O’brien, where a bunch of stoned kids make all sorts of claims about what Amsterdam is like and what is legal there….all fabulous misrepresentations of the truth.

I live in Germany, and have done so for 15 years…not as an expat working for an american company, but as an american working for german companies.

In those 15 years there have been NO real wage gains in Germany,a dn there have been a number of concessions on working hours, wages and benefits from workers unionized and not.

For the greater part of those 15 years there has been an unemployment rate of over 8%.

The percentage of women who work is about half that of America, so you are also going form a much smaller baseline on the unemployment.

The unemployment benfits have been severely restricted, with them capping out at 52 weeks, after which a minimal welfare program of 352€ a month kicks in, which also requires you to deplete your personal savings to continue to collect.

Germany has also upped the retirment age to 67, with serious discussions of moving it to 70.

Health care is decent here, with both a private and a public option. The private is available to people with a pre-tax income above 60,000€ a year, which is about 15% of the population. EVERYONE pays 50% of their insurance premiums…companies are NOT allowed to pay more….the insurance premiums are 15.5% of your salary, with a minimum of 150€ a month (half of whcih you pay) and a maximum of about 750€. The public system is also introducing an additional 225€ a year in additional payments from the workers in the public system, because it runs at a deficit. Co-pays and cuts in what is covered have also been par for the course.

Patients with private coverage are favoured by doctors, and can usually get appointments same day, or within a week, whereas public patients often have to wait a long time. Hospitals genrally have a seperate wing with nicer amenities for the private patients.

Pensions were established on a “pay as you go” basis, so there is no real trust fund built up. When it was established there were 20 people working for every pensioner….now the number is 3 to 1, and the burden is becoming huge.

Immigration to germany is relatively easy….but the influx of workers from eastern europe like Romania and Poland has defintiely pushed wages down.

Even at companies like Mercedes up to 30% of the workers work for temp agencies, so they can avoid paying them the benefits associated with their full time work force….

the major drugstore chains are notorius for using the rules of “mini-jobs” to hire a large percentage of workers who earn under 400€ a month for up to 22 hours a week….these jobs have no social benefits, and do not accrue towards your social security or pension benfits.

There are also many people workign in 1€ an hour jobs, which piggybacks on welfare payments.

These were schemes built to bring the long term unemployed into work, but they have become a normal form of employment in a lot of industries.

The export companies are strong, btu a lot of this has been borne on the back of the average and skilled german worker.

Germany has been on the forefront of outsourcing…outsourcing work to the czech republic, romania, china and the like. more than 50% of the value addition in a German car takes place outside of Germany.

The reason there is a shortage of skilled workers is because of an aging population, and because the school system is not pushing out enough people with the skills that are necessary.

They are also actively pushing for skilled immigration, but for a number of reasons, they aren’t finding any takers….the language is a barrier, the unwillingness of german companies to promote women or hire foreigners for leading jobs is an impediment…the high tax rate and rather moderate earnign ability is another.

I like Germany, I have done very well here, but it is not some form of Utopia.

that is a bunch of crap…..WalMart did not succeed because they were too expensive….they could not compete with the incredibly efficient hyper discounters like Aldi and Lidl. Those chains have 4000 locations in the country, and their assortment is SEVERLY limited, so their ability to push volume dwarf even walmart, allowing them to continually drop their prices…and be incredibly tight on the margins for their suppliers throughout the world.

If you wrote all of this in your own diary post, it were certainly be a benefit to all of us.

sorry, don’t know how.

Also not sure this place needs a wingnut diary.

And there is a typo, it should be 50k, not 60k€

Does anyone outside of the South actually drink Dr. Pepper? I quit buying Snapple 20 years or so ago when they were a big sponsor of Limbaugh. And Mott’s Applesauce? I’m not that toothless or old yet.

There is some abuse of immigrant workers in Germany. I don’t have any statistics at hand, but I do not believe it is of the same order of magnitude as seen in the US. Generally you will find some number of immigrants working on major constructions sites(particularly in Berlin during the construction boom of the last decade) and you will find immigrants(“illegal”) working “under the table” in smaller restaurants, cafes, and bars.

Germany, from the perspective of the right-wing (CDU/CSU-which is still “left” of the US Democrats), has a immigration problem, and routinely politicians use the “foreigners taking german jobs” card to incite hatred. But these views are not as widespread and popular as here in America. Germany has taken countless numbers of political refugees from around the world and the largest foreign-born populations in Germany are the Turks and Russians. Since WWII, in large part due to guest-worker policies of reconstruction era German governments, many Italian, Greek and Turkish workers were invited to come to Germany in the 50′s and 60′s to do low skilled labor.

With the advent of EU, which allows people born in differing countries within the EU to live and work in other EU nations, the status of Italian and Greek people(and their children) working and living in Germany changed. Turkey has a strict policy of not taking back passports- so most Turks(or rather of Turkish descent) living in Germany nowadays have defacto dual citizenship.

With the fall of the wall in 1989 large numbers of german-speaking people, who had formed relatively isolated communities in countries throughout eastern Europe and Russia migrated to Germany. The two largest groups being Russian Germans and Romanian Germans. Modern Germany is profoundly multi-cultural, far more so than Germany ever was historically and I would venture to say moreso than most of America today. There is discrimination in Germany, particularly towards those with darker skin(turkish, north african etc.) however cultural tolerance is highly valued in the society at large.

Germany is not a melting-pot culture, there is far more tolerance for distinct cultural differences -ie. people do not have to prove themselves German to the extent that immigrants to America have had to prove themselves American. That being said there are unfortunately many immigrants who have never brought themselves into mainstream German culture(ie. by adopting the cultural norms and learning the German language)-unfortunate in the sense that these people remain relatively unempowered and cannot demand their most basic rights.

(I just arrived last year back in the states after having lived in Germany for the past 15 years)

Although I do not have all the facts at hand I would venture to say that the incredibly low quality of stuff sold at Walmart in Germany, coupled with the VAT taxation system, which works against the insane profit margins of volume purchasing are the two largest culprits for Walmarts’ failure in Germany.

The quality of goods sold at Walmart in Germany was far less than what is to be found in American Walmarts. (and that says something!). Germans, by and large, tend to save up their money and buy something of quality, rather than purchase cheap throw away items only to replace them 6 months or a year later. Germans have two words for what we in english call cheap: Guenstig and Billig. Guenstig implies that something is of lower price but still relatively good quality, whereas Billig means that something is cheap-and cheap means not only cheap price, but cheap quality and workmanship.

There is a far broader consensus in Germany that people should earn a living wage, and that the quantity of their pay is directly present in the quality of the services and goods produced. The CDU/CSU and the FDP and to a far smaller percent wanna-be SPD’ers like Gerhard Schroeder, have done an awful lot of work to undermine these values with the introduction of things like “mini-jobs” and the 600 Euro jobs. Ostensibly these measure were introduced to reduce the unemployment which in the late 90′s and early 2000′s hovered around 10%(and regionally, as in former east Germany in places as high as 20-25%).

Nothing pained me more during my stay in Germany than to see Germany attempt time and again to follow failed American polices. It was heart-rending. The right wing in Germany kept crying “Standort Deutschland”, saying that Germany’s taxes were to high to lure foreign investment, all the while slashing wages and increasing co-pays in an idiotic attempt to make Germany more friendly to aggressive multi-national corporations. Then there were moves to privatize state-run “monopolies” like the post and the railsystem(DeutscheBahn).

Both of these privatization runs resulted in a serious degradation of the services provided(many rail lines serving smaller communities were cut, forcing people to drive to the next village/town for work and shopping), and large numbers of jobs were lost, all in the name of “efficiency”. I kept asking myself and fellow Germans why in the hell couldn’t Germany try to replicate some of the positive things in America, instead of just blindly adopting the stupidity coming out of America.

Germany is certainly no Utopia, but it is a hell of lot closer to a realization of the values that most American left and progressives hold than America is. There is real economic hardship and struggle in Germany, but it pales in comparison to what we experience here in America. Germany has had long-term structural problems with unemployment, much higher than we have traditionally had here in the states. But Germany has a social safety net, which, despite it’s problems and despite the attempts of the right to undermine it, is still functional and provides the unemployed in Germany a quality of life which American unemployed can only dream of. On top of that most Germans don’t even know what debt is(relative to Americans).

look up the rates of foreigners attending university, school performance, general income levela dn the liek, adn tell me there are only slight problems with integration.

I have lived in germany just as long, and the gap is enormous…Turks make up 2% of the population (even higher of the young population due to their higher birth rate)…wanna guess their representation at university…under 0.5%….

Dream on of the phantasy land somewhere else where all reality doesn’t exist.

My wife is from East Germany, and sometimes I read the childrens books from back then, and they seemed to believe their idea of a utopia….

Your first sentence says it all.

Walmart works when it sells branded goods at a lower price than others…but germans don’t buy branded goods in food or consumer goods to the extent that americans do. They go to discounters far more. Same goes for furniture, where Ikea has the alrgest market share, and it is the largest market share of any country Ikea is present, including sweden.

The social safety net has led to structural unemployment, adn generation of some families where no one has held a job,a dn where they have learned to live off of whatever the state has deemed to give them.

This has come to the detriment of the hard working lower skilled person, who often is worse off than the welfare recipient.

I think German workers have been too moderate in wage demands,a nd I think German companies have generally been too stingy with wage increases. There we agree, but this is what has led to germany being an “export worl champion”, whcih just means they export all the good stuff in exchange for other countries IOU’s….the standard of living has dropped….much is also due to the introduction of the €, which does not properly represent German productivity….but war guilt meant they had to say yes to that, and keep saying yes.

Not living in fantasy land, my view of Germany is quite critical. Just as you won’t often find two Americans who paint the same picture of their own country, you probably won’t often find 2 Americans who lived a long time in Germany who see it the same way. I was commenting on “immigration problem” not “integration problem”. Two vary different beasts.

Comparing Germany and America is fraught with difficulties, except on very abstract levels. The devil is in the details. Integration is a horrifically complex issue. But I learned quickly that I could not understand integration issues from the vantage point of a melting-pot society. A large number of immigrants to Germany have no desire to be “Germans”. This is in fundamental difference to the traditional melting-pot values of American society. A lot of those who do not desire to be Germans, are paradoxically more “German” (in terms of their values, attitudes and behavior) than a lot of (TM)Germans. The majority of “Turks” in Germany were born and raised in Germany and only know Turkey as the place they go on vacation or where their ancestors come from. Identity is a really friggin complicated thing, and multi-culturalism is janus-faced. One face of multi-culturalism is an apparent schizophrenia in the culture where there is no dominant identity, no normative identity which subsumes the multitude of subcultures inside Germany. Another face of multi-culturalism is peaceful coexistence and mutual profit from the differences.

The language barrier is difficult. German is far more difficult to master than English is(regardless of which mother-tongue one starts off with). The saddest part of the “integration problem” is the number of older immigrants who never mastered German and were never able to claim their rights and seize opportunities they might have had, had they been able to linguistically comprehend their situation. Many of the immigrants who came to Germany as part of the guest-worker programs back in the 50′s and the 60′s were barely functionally literate, not to mention the waves of political refugees which have been poring into Germany over the last 30 years.

Where you rightly point out that those of Turkish decent are woefully under-represented at the German university, I am not so sure about the statistics of those attending Hochschule(to which there is no strict American equivalent-ie. secondary education).

You don’t end up at the university in Germany if you don’t have parents who place a high value on literacy in general and education specifically who are going to push you to score well on the tests taken in the fifth grade which determine which tier of the school system you will be attending(their are 3 tiers to the german school system: Hochschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium-how you score on tests given in the fifth grade determine your placement in one of the 3, only those who attend the Gymnasium are automatically eligible to attend the university).

If your parents struggled or failed to master German, it is exceedingly unlikely that you would score well enough to land in the Gymnasium. The only other route to the university if passing the Arbitur which is an additional 2 years of schooling after completion of the Realschule(this option is not available to those on the lowest-Hochschule-tier of the 3 tiered Germans school system). If you are born into a family where you are expected to go out and earn money as soon as you finish school, you probably won’t get to take 2 years of your life to go and finish the arbitur. Plus percentage wise no where near as many Germans ever attend the university as is the case in America.

I am in no way trying to minimize integration issues, but they are in reality quite complex. I tend to avoid phrases like “integration problems” and see them rather as issues. I do not believe their are ready-made answers or solutions to these things, and the “solution” to the “problem” is more the emergent social consensus as the demographics of the society changes. Sure those demagoguing on the right in Germany scream about the “problem”, but those on the left are working in the various ethnic communities bridging the gaps 1 family, 1 friend at a time. I never once saw of politically right-wing German spending their off-work hours befriending or socializing with the disadvantaged minorities in Germany.

We are probably looking at this issue from different class perspectives. Ikea may count as a discount furniture store for people from the middle to upper-middle classes but they are in a different league than stores like Walmart and Sams. Sure I remember stores like Lidl and Aldi and a handful of other major chain discount stores, but the relative percentage of Germans purchasing their goods there, in my perception, paled in contrast to Americans shopping in Walmart and Sams and the like here in America.

I went to the local Walmart in Freiburg a number of times prior to it closing-it was close and I was curious. The only people I saw at that store were members of the economic underclass(which you can tell by clothing and hair styles more than anything else). Contrast that with Americans where people in the upper middle class use their relative economic advantage over poorer Americans to purchase bulk items at a fraction of the cost that the poorer pay in the local neighborhood stores.

In America the poorer you are the more you pay for most things, if for no other reason than the lack of adequate public transportation in most major American cities. I never saw such in Germany and most of the people I associated with were from the lower-half of the economic spectrum in Germany. The popularity of extreme discount stores(the sheer numbers of such stores and what percentage of the population/frequency of visits in Germany, in my experience, was far, far less in Germany than here in America. But then again I did not know many people in the upper-middle class in Germany, perhaps they engaged more in the same kinds of social injustice than those, in that class, in America do.

You are 100% correct and Germany like some of more Capitalistic countries have been trying to walk back the social safety net. Some people in America should also pay attention to what happens in France. While they likely have the best social safety net next to the Scandinavians electing Right Wing politicians, not Neo-Conservatives but Neo-Liberals like Schroeder or Sarkozy has impacted these social safety nets to a degree.

I don’t think Liberals in America want to carbon-copy what happens in Europe. If you want a model of how to do Health Care you might wanna look at Singapore, not Europe. Europe as a aging problem and lack of child birth problem which is why the incentives to have children are so go. Trust me newly born citizens are also future tax payers, Governments stay in business by having more citizens. When you have low birth rates like in much of Europe, its not because they are being benevolent. Its more likely if you do A,B and C, you’ll get D (more healthy kids).

That said there is a sense is solidarity in Europe that’s missing in here. With that you have Union solidarity and unlike here so many people desperate for a good paying job are willing to walk across picket lines to work Union jobs as scabs.

America could be as close to Utopia as humanly possible if we just lived up to our rhetoric about how “Great A Country It Is”.

The opposing of a Mosque in Lower Manhattan is one of those “moments” I’m talking about which is the hypocrisy of our rhetoric.

I know many have forgotten that we put much of these policies in place with the Marshall Plan, a US idea from the FDR administration.

But its really the 20 percenters I would call them, mostly White and mostly Southern. Not all old, some very young and most of them middle aged. They are not politically sophisticated, so that’s why they are using the GOP and its Echo Chamber.

Whenever the Right mentions something no matter how outrageous, its all over the cable news networks.

We have Link TV and I guess you could say MSNBC, but those are not equal to Fox (and all the AM radio shows) which is on at every Truck Stop around America. Not to mention Restaurants, Hair Salons and any other public area with TV’s. If not Fox then CNN, MSNBC is an after-though and because Link doesn’t pursue a typical TV model to generate profits, nobody knows what it is and its all word of mouth that keeps the channel afloat.

I think we have to re-think how we view media because if I got auto racing fans complaining about streaming video of the race for a niche market motorsport, can you imagine the people that don’t know about alternative sources of information?

The battle is so uphill that I think most of the time I should be someplace else. It will take too long and too much work to benefit me near-future and I’m only concerned about MYSELF because I don’t have any children, no wife and neither on the horizon (not for lack of trying).

So while the above post bring reality to places like Germany I almost rather be in Germany because reduced benefits is better than NO benefits I get now. I also had a wage freeze but its was barely above the poverty level anyway, so what’s the point?

Sharron Angle is right about one thing, hell yes I rather take Unemployment than take some POS job that barely pays over the min wage. Not to mention paying for gas and eating generally unhealthy away from home.

They are, because many in Europe’s upper class are TAX CHEATS! They hide their money in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Many a rich German or British race driver lives in Monaco for tax reasons. Not that living in Monaco or even Switzerland like alot of Rich French and Germans do is a bad place to be, trust me.

Some just don’t feel they owe anything to society that gave them the opportunity to be rich.

Tax cheating is pervasive in Europe, but its not a large problem because most of the wealthy with attachments to their countries stay and pay taxes or find ways to avoid it.

I was going to say allowing the Rich to opt out of the public system in Germany is flawed and will likely be corrected soon because its setup an unfair system. Like you said Doctors are likely to take private insurance patients much sooner than the public plan patients. The main driver for fixing it is not that, but the rising cost of Health Care in general, they need additional income, the rich are the only people not in the Public System. In Canada, there is no such “Class Warefare” being waged, the Rich have just as much access as the Poor do, the same. But I guess there’s a slight concern about loosing population if the tax system is too aggressive in Europe. After all the weather isn’t all that great, it rains alot, snows in the winter, generally cold most of the time unless you live in the southern half of Europe. I would also say that Europe/EU is a bit like a gated community, some countries like Denmark are really tight on immigration and don’t have much diversity. Turks are a permanent under class in Germany. Pols and Russians are treated no better in much of Europe as well and as you said shows in how adding those workers have dropped wages because they are willing to work for less “over a barrel”.

Oh one other thing. I know Germans, especially East Germans, go over to Poland to shop and take advantage of the Euro’s value over the local currency. But as far as I can tell, most Europeans are not the hoarders we. Yes the Rich/Upper Class do shop Wal-Mart/Target/Kmart to take advantage of their buying power. This is why Best Buy, Wal-Marts, Lowe’s and Home Depots are in middle and upper income areas. In fact Porter Ranch one of the more affluent areas in the San Fernando Valley has typical big box fare like Toys-R-Us, Best Buy, Petco and Wal-Mart…

To imply that the structural unemployment problem is a function of the social safety net is like saying that eating healthy and exercise is the cause of health problems and obesity. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. The structural unemployment issues boil down to basically two things: the ending and/or scaling back of subsidized industries( coal in particular, mining in general(steel, etc)) and the fact that most German workers have formalized education in their field, ie. that they are certified to work(accredited), and that this accreditation system(Hochschule, Reife etc.) has been slow to adapt to a) the growth of the service sector and b) the emergence of newer technologies and skillsets (IT)which are not i) not adequately backed by accreditation systems and ii) not unionized. And I will just ignore that the labor demands have sharply dropped off due to the incredible advances in “efficiency” which have rendered an ever-growing percent of the population superfluous to the actual GDP of the society.

The social safety net *is* the answer to fluctuations in labor demand, not the cause of unemployment. No amount of raping of the social safety net is going to result in the luring of sufficient foreign investment to change the unemployment situation in Germany. Much akin to laying of(edit: off, no sexual pun intended :) ) public-sector workers in America is not going to magically create a boom of small businesses which is going to put all Americans back to work.

I notice there’s a demand for Engineers and skills related to things like Glass Making, Welding and Infrastructure. In fact on DW they mentioned the German economy needs 150,000 Engineers over the next 10 years and mentions vacancies all around Europe.

I can tell you one of the reasons I am going to take IP/Networking Infrastructure and get an AS degree in that is not so I work in America, but so I can work in Denmark which this job is on its “Positive List”. Which means they need workers in that sector.

I know from friend’s working in Networking in America that many local companies pay the bare minimum because they know they can hire somebody from say India or China and pay them less.

Until this supply-side economic boondoggle is further trashed and disposed of we won’t get out of this cycle.

I was going to say allowing the Rich to opt out of the public system in Germany is flawed and will likely be corrected soon because its setup an unfair system.

Every couple of years this is proposed, then someone does the math and they see that the public system would loose money if all private insured would switch into the public system.
That is because contributions to the public system have an upper limit and the demographic of the private insured is rather old in comparison to the general population.

I’m in favor of a Bürgerversicherung (i.e. everyone is in the public system) for ideological reasons, but it’s absence is actually not a great problem.

Turks are a permanent under class in Germany.

That is rather hyperbolic. The only way this would happen is when the present trend of the brain drain of well educated Turks will become much stronger.

But anecdotally I hear of a lot of Turkish-Germans who went to Turkey came back quite soon, because of the “culture shock.”
Too well Germanized ;-)

True but I have heard that from German news sources and critics so I’m just saying what they are saying and its also coming from German scholars who say the same thing, so it likely true IMHO.

Thanks to all of you expats for sharing your experience. I suspect that iwbcman @ 39 is right that we don’t all see things the same way when we live permanently in another country. I have spent a lot of time in France, and I know that my view of it isn’t like the average tourist, and not like that of my US friends who live there.

Geoghegan’s view, which I share, is that we need to look at the things they are doing right and see what part of that we can use here. What we are doing here isn’t working.