Germany is in a structural crisis: declining exports, rising energy prices and weakening competitiveness in its most important sectors. But according to the bosses of Germany’s biggest companies, the real problem is that workers are getting too sick.
Several German employers have lamented a record year of sickness-related absences.
Millions of Germans are calling in sick to work at almost four times the rate seen in the UK, giving new meaning to the country’s nickname “the sick man of Europe”.
Research Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), Germany’s largest health insurance fund, showed that workers lost an average of 19.4 days of work due to illness in 2023, a record.
The country could set another record absence year in 2024 after TK’s 5.7 million insured workers. He has registered 14.3 sick days in the first 9 months of the year, before the well-known holiday sickness period.
Although it has largely avoided a technical recession, the German economy shrank by 0.3% in 2023 and is projected to contract by 0.2% this year.
‘The Sick Man of Europe’
Workers took 15 days off in 2022 in Germany. In comparison, UK workers He has lost 5.7 days to illness in the same year
German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VFA) he says Without above average sick days, the German economy would grow by 0.5% in 2023 instead of falling by 0.3%.
In short, this means that Germany’s high disease rate cost the economy around 26 billion euros last year, according to the VFA.
These findings have not been lost on German employers, who are not convinced that workers are actually sick.
An unnamed blue-chip manufacturing executive he said to him FT that there was an “unwillingness” among workers to understand the sacrifices needed to advance the country’s economy. He singled out young workers who are “work shy” as a particular problem.
“And then everyone asks why Germany is the sick man of Europe,” said the director.
German law allows for the hiring of employees six weeks leave while receiving a full salary, which has frustrated some employers.
In September, the managers of Tesla’s Grünheide factory in Germany he visited the houses about 30 employees called in sick, Handelsblatt notify The automaker said employee absenteeism was up 5% on Fridays and late shifts compared to other days of the week.
“This is not an indicator of poor working conditions, because the working conditions are the same every working day and every shift,” said André Thierig, the country’s manufacturing director. the guard. “It suggests that the German social system is being exploited to some extent.”
Albrecht Wehner, a health management expert at TK, said it was too short-sighted to blame the rise in cold and flu cases on the country’s economic woes.
“A cold is sometimes essential and usually only lasts a few days. Long-term diagnoses such as mental illness are much more significant. Even fewer workers are affected by this. But the number of days off is quite high,” Wehner said.
Germany is facing many social and economic problems that have no easy solutions. The economic giant’s manufacturing-intensive economy has been vulnerable to global shocks and is losing competitiveness due to China’s industrial capacity.
These have affected German exports, which account for a large part of the country’s GDP.
Its previous dependence on Russian oil and gas has also caused a shock to the country’s energy prices due to sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, putting further pressure on input costs. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong, or is going wrong. “, Carsten Brzeski, Global Head of Macro at ING, summarized in advance luck.
