Germany invites skilled workers from Greece

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_GERMANY_HELP_WANTED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-11-13-08-03-15

BERLIN (AP) -- Prosperous Germany has a surprising message for sinking Greece: Help Wanted.

With a shrinking labor force and buoyant economy, Germany desperately needs skilled workers to keep its industrial engine churning forward. Increasingly, it's seeking them from Greece and other European laggards like Spain and Portugal where unemployment is soaring amid fears of financial implosion.

Germany quickly overcame the financial meltdown that started in 2008 and unemployment is now at a 20-year low of 6.6 percent. Companies are so desperate to fill skilled labor shortages that the government has taken to organizing matchmaking sessions between German firms and job seekers from crisis-hit countries.

Greek civil engineer Christos Kotanidis moved to Erlangen in southern Germany three months ago and quickly found work with industrial giant Siemens.



***{financialy} invade them -- then depopulate the country.

[potone]

1. You left something out.

Financially invade them, insult and outrage them (by telling them to sell off the Athenian acropolis and their islands), and THEN depopulate them. :mad:

[FarCenter]

2. Labor mobility was always one of the objectives of the EU

An advantage of a larger economic unity is that labor can move to where the jobs are.

This gives the EU a better ability to compete with economies such as the US, where workers can move from Michigan to Texas, or with China, where workers move from the interior provinces to the coastal provinces.

[libinnyandia]

3. One problem in the US is if you own a home and can't sell it,

it's hard to move where the jobs are.

[FarCenter]

4. That's a recent phenomenon, and mostly affects older, higher income workers

Recent college grads rarely own homes, so they can move more readily. And lower income workers are often renters. In China, workers leave their families behind in the village while they are working on the coast.