“Gastarbeiter” of the European South Unite! You got a new employer! A German one! The German Railways (Deutsche Bahn) want to recruit personnel from the EZ-bailout countries of the European South like Greece, Spain and Portugal to address the company’s personnel shortcomings.
“We really think in this direction,” DB-Personnel Chief Ulrich Weber told German business mazagine Capital.
“Through our subsidiaries abroad (Schenker Rail and Arriva), we have good preconditions to achieve this and we currently discuss with our colleagues abroad,” Weber said adding that no concrete decisions have been taken yet.
Nevertheless in the first stage, DB administration managed an agreement with the German Agency for Employment to recruit more young and unemployed.
According to Weber, the Deutsche Bahn plans to fill 80,000 work places within the next ten years.” ( via manager-magazine)
I was thinking to immediately apply for a job as stewardess, toilet and/or window cleaner or driver.
I could also hold high the sign for the train to leave the station – by day and/or by night
I could also just blow with a whistle “Train Move” and thus using the intonation of five to six EU and Not-EU languages – which is my very secret talent.
Or I could even set per hand the Train Departure Board at some sleepy German village.
But in ten years? I won’t be young and unemployed, but rather old and dead from starvation…
PS Why the DB does not want to hire jobless from Ireland is an issue that could anger our friends from the North, no? Either unemployment is not so high there, or our German masters just want to get on hold of the European South only.
This does of course beg the question why does DB not recruit from the native German pool of unemployed, which is quite substantial?
Here is one possible answer. The German government is massaging the figures so that the German public don’t realise the real extent of German unemployment.
http://www.thenewfederalist.eu/Youth-Unemployment-in-Germany-More-a-Sham-than-Success,04846
Then there is of course the PR exercise of Germany trying to be seen as the “savour” for all those poor Southern hemisphere unemployed people. Blissfully ignoring that a lot of that unemployement and poverty was created through German imposed austerity measures. And although everybody now seems to agree that “austerity doesn’t work”, that is again a scam. Austerity did exactly what it was supposed to do. It created a massive pool of desperately poor people who will accept a job no matter what, irrespective of the pay. And combine that German created situation with the fact that Germany has NO MINIMUM WAGE policy, and you have the perfect recipe to start driving down German wage demands by using “Gastarbeiter”. They did the very same years ago in the building industry by importing thousands of Turkish workers.
As for not recruiting in Ireland, that has everything to do with the Irish Social Welfare System. It is being enthousiastically dismantled by the Irish government, but hasn’t reached profitable exploitation status yet. Still some way to g, as confirmed by the lates IMF report on the “health” of the Irish system.
“SOCIAL welfare benefits are too high in Ireland and need to be revised to encourage people back to work, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.The organisation warned that dole payments are high by international standards and responsible for “low exit rates” from the Live Register.
As the IMF forecast the economy to grow by just 0.5pc this year, it said that certain welfare payments should be means-tested to avoid long-term unemployment.
It is also important to ensure that jobseekers are willing and able to fill jobs when they become available”
It hasn’t dawned on them yet that the “low exit rate” might have something to do with “no jobs”. But while the Irish government is happily dismantling the welfare system, I’m sure that there are others like DB waiting in the wings to pounce once the Irish have been whipped into the neo-liberal line dictated by Berlin.
Odd enough, Schenker Rail and Arriva are DB’s sibsidiaries in the UK!
Nobody says that recruitment through Schenker Rail and Arriva means employment there, or visa versa. It’s the EU remember? Free (?) movement etc. You’ll probably find it even cheaper for them to recruit that way instead of direct. Possibly some subsidies, tax breaks,etc here and there, paid for by the local tax payers of course.
A few years ago the Irish put out a tender to build a bypass around the town of Ennis in the West. The contract was won by a Turkish company GAMA construction. The minimum wage in Ireland at that stage was something like 8.15€/hour (not sure that’s the exact amount, but not too far off). Through a system of “legal” manipulations including recruitement agencies in Holland amongst others, the workers on the road ended up bding less than 2€/hour, before tax…
If exploitation is the intent, the EU will accommodate. You just need to know how to go about it.