Labor Minister Heil also wants to use older workers to combat the shortage of skilled workers. They shouldn’t be written off so quickly by corporations, he demands. According to a study, digitization would be slowed down considerably by the lack of skilled workers.
Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil has called on companies to focus more on older employees in the fight against the shortage of staff. “In times of growing shortage of workers and skilled workers, our economy cannot do without experienced employees,” he told the “Spiegel” according to the advance report. “The time when over 60-year-olds were scrapped in many large corporations must be over.”
The statutory age limit for pension insurance is currently 66 years. On average, however, employees retire much earlier, at 64.1 years. However, Heil had already rejected a further increase in the retirement age to over 67 in the past.
The “Spiegel” also reported on a study by the Institute of German Economics, according to which the increasing shortage of labor is jeopardizing important progress projects such as digitization. Accordingly, the skills gap in digitization professions will grow to a new high by 2026. Almost 106,000 positions in this area will then not be mathematically filled – especially in training occupations such as construction electricians or mechatronics technicians, as the magazine reported.
