Germany: Hartz IV regulations reforming unemployment insurance didn’t help reinstate long-term jobseekers

Last week, the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur – BA) provided, for the first time, figures published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, confirming that the people who receive the Hartz IV allowance have little hope of ever coming back to the employment market.  Since 2005, the number of people who continuously received the Hartz IV allowance is 1.42M, i.e. slightly less than half the current number of jobseekers listed.  In addition, 436,000 of them never found a new job.  A BA spokesman said that, since the Hartz IV reforms notably consisted in the merger of welfare and long-term unemployment, part of the people listed was “more than long-term jobseekers.”  Nevertheless, this merger was also planned to better reinstate people receiving welfare.  Some of these people, listed as jobseekers, will never be able to work because of their health.  Others have absolutely no degree or professional qualification.  Besides, the group of “permanent beneficiaries” isn’t only made up of people “hard to place” or poorly trained.  370,000 of them are single mothers and 90,000 are jobseekers who reached early retirement age.  Finally, an unspecified proportion is composed of people who regularly work but whose income is too low.  They appeal to Hartz IV to “supplement” their income.  Wilhelm Adamy, labor market expert at the German Trade Union Confederation, thinks that the “vicious circle of precariousness” leads these people to shift between inactivity, temp jobs and fixed-term contracts in different sectors.  He is blaming the lack of qualification measures and of “stable” interlocutors in employment centers.  Consequently, it is particularly complicated to determine a coherent strategy to return to the labor market.