Attract more immigrants *who have years of experience in specific high-qualification professions
You can get in there as someone who’s worked as an engineer for 3 years or something, but it’s unlikely for someone who’s not an EU citizen to be able to get employment there to drive trams.
That is fair, too, Germany’s minimum wage is €12 which is slightly more than half of their neighbouring Switzerland’s 23 CHF per hour. I bet tons of people would be willing to drive a tram if they payed more.
That said, I don’t think it’s nice to refer to immigrants as “cheap labour from overseas” especially when the alternative is literally children.
Germany on-budget allocation is 477 Bn Euros and their off-budget special funds are 869 Bn Euros, as long as people vote for who is in power then German Billionaires are far below them on the food chain.
Do I think backroom deals occur? Yeah, enough to put them at #14 in the democracy index instead of #1. That’s what that number means, how compromised they are on a scale. The German ruling class are the average people.
According to this, my country, Australia is tied with 14th and 100% there is a ruling class who favour corporate lobbying and billionaires over everyone else.
This ranking means jack shit. The only way you’re not going to have a ruling class is to be a true democracy, a direct democracy, and not have a class of people dedicated to leading for you. Anyone else is too easily and systematically bought out.
I entirely reject your premise that being 14th in a democracy ranking means you don’t have a ruling class.
That’s because Australia is lower than Germany on that particular list. Australia has a massive corruption ring particularly in NSW, but they also have housing projects, single-payer medical, and full subsidized higher education degrees.
TBH I agree they should be ranked lower, they’ve been declining in the score given by Economist Intelligence Unit since 2012, I expect their score will continue to decline in 2024’s rankings.
You had corrupt politicians selling masks during Covid and getting kickbacks, you allow politicians to also be lobbyists, that’s institutionalised corruption.
62% of Germans feel government corruption is a big problem in your country.
In this case it’s a giant housing shortage though. The city (and large surrounding area) is Freiburg in the south. Rents are so expensive and available flats are so rare that companies don’t find workers who could actually live there. Also: the comparably good loans don’t mean much when it’s only channeled into a greedy landlord’s pockets.
Edit: oh no i was wrong it’s Nuremberg - their public transport organization is also “VAG”. But Freiburg has a huge labor shortage due to unaffordable housing and housing shortage.
It’s practically the same. Nürnberg has a joined University with it’s neighbouring city, Erlangen. Erlangen has the highest rent per square meter (if you’re not eligible for student housing). It’s high prices for the whole region, because the Nürnberg-Erlangen metro region is the biggest population, business and cultural center in the north of Bavaria.
Yeah, at my university it was pretty common for students to take on bus driver jobs. A tram is, admittedly, a bit different from that, but a job is a job.
I don’t know what the current pay rate is for that job, but I am certain that if the pay was double of whatever it is now the worker shortage would suddenly vanish!
Ha, you’re probably right. I guess you aren’t supposed to talk to the driver, but I imagined they would see and hear from a lot of the city’s community members, might know people’s lives more?
Maybe not, like you said, just keep your eyes and the road and don’t interact wouldn’t offer much perspective.
Edit, maybe more empathy when people take issue with road conditions and traffic! 😋
If the situation in Germany is anything like the Netherlands, it legit is just a shortage of workers outright.
There are more job vacancies than people to fill those vacancies, so you end up with a shortage of workers.
Making tram driving more attractive by paying them more would draw employees away from other industries, who also need people to do the work.
Not saying tram drivers shouldn’t be paid more, but if the situation in this German city is anything like what we are dealing with here in the NL, then paying people more is not going to solve the issue. Only solution is to either decrease the number of open positions (which usually only happens in a recession, which is not great), or to increase the number of people who can do the work (for example through immigration)
Edit: A possible solution specifically in the case of trams could be automation (self-driving trams), which would relax the overall demand for workers.
There are already transportation system without drivers that have been operating since the 80s (e.g. the London DLR)
It’s probably a bit more tricky in mixed traffic, but since trams are on predictable rails it would be easier than automating cars.
For what it’s worth 2 out of 3 subway lines are already fully automated. They started in 2008.
Trams have the same issues as self driving cars though: you need to 100% reliably detect people in front of the carriage. And you can easily find tests with Teslas which just run over a child sized doll because they didn’t detect it properly. The tech is just not there yet.
I agree with you entirely that automated trams are more difficult than automated metro systems. However I do think that trams are a most likely a more easily solvable problem than automated cars.
Trams are restricted to their track, so the number of unique situations in which they can end up is more limited.
Because of this you can model the environment in more detail.
Trams are large, heavy and commercial vehicles. So you can justify shelling out for more detailed sensors such as lidar etc, whereas on a Tesla you have to make due with merely a camera sensor.
You could potentially hire a dedicated person in a central location whose job it is to remotely get trams out of tricky situations.
This would not remove the need for drivers outright, but could reduce the number of drivers you need per tram.
That is not to say automated trams are easy, or already viable. I’m just saying that they are likely more viable than automated cars will be in the nearby future.
German companies can go through the beurocracy of hiring and training people from abroad and they will get visas when this actually occurs. But there is nothing wrong with hiring part timers who also study at a university. The job is unattractive because of shift work. Expanding recruitment to people seeking part time jobs makes sense.
People are really apprehensive of that still. I agree, but we’re going to need more people becoming accepting.
I’m not arguing with the job shortage. I just can’t get my head around the migration.
There were always people filling lower paying job (I’m not advocating for less than deserving compensation). Now there isn’t?
Maybe the same jobs exist, but new higher paying jobs have appeared that weren’t around before (new technology, more corporate,.etc), so people just skilled up, moved up, and left the lower jobs vacant?
I think most developed countries where this happens just replace these less desirable jobs with immigration (not advocating for an idea of a lesser population)?
Maybe there’s not as much immigration in some of these places?
Making tram driving more attractive by paying them more would draw employees away from other industries, who also need people to do the work.
That’s how free markets work, though. If there is a labour shortage, places which are important should pay more, to attract people away from other places, who either also raise wages or make do with fewer people or shutter.
This is just inflationary pressure hitting employers, like all of us. Except when it’s a person, you just have to tighten the belt, or make do with higher prices, but when it’s a company, it’s a societal problem where simply paying more cannot be the solution.
I agree with you. The only issue I have is that some “important” things have much less extra money to dedicate to raising wages than less important things. The amount of profit isn’t always in line with the importance of a thing I guess. But if it’s that important then I guess government subsidies would be able to fix that gap
I don’t think it’s a subsidy if the government was paying bills in the first place. It’s just raising wages in the public sector, which is by the way the prime driver of raising wages in the private sector as well.
Pay for tram operators here in Germany isn’t that bad actually. Yes could definitely be more, but we’ve a general worker shortage here so that plays a lot into it.
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