Simon Jäger, associate professor at Princeton University (New Jersey) and MIT, is a specialist in the labor economy.
Today, in Germany, 10,000 industrial jobs are disappearing each month. Is this the end of the classic industry worker?
The German industrial model is strongly under pressure. But the crisis began a long time ago, as early as 2017-2018, when the drop in the production of intensive energy industries. In the 2000s and 2010s, Germany greatly benefited from the industrial boom in Asia and China. This success, which was accompanied by a boom on the job market, concealed many things, such as the aging of infrastructure, the lack of investment in the technologies of the future, the imbalance of energy supply. We pay the price today.
This raises the question of the future of the German economic model, which has always been strongly based on the production of high quality machines. The problem is that there are no more customers for these products around the world, and that competition has strengthened. And, in general, production jobs are declining everywhere, even in China.
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Source: Lemonde