In an opinion piece for Euronews, Dr Nikolas Stihl, chairman of world-leading chainsaw maker STIHL, calls for reforms including a 40-hour working week without extra pay to safeguard Germany's prosperity and welfare state.View on euronews
I imagine the same thing which finished off heavy industry in the U.K. is hurting DE a lot also, high energy prices.
Less of a direct effect on assembly businesses, but for heavy production where your process is largely to convert energy to product its devestating. Then you lose those job while also having to pay another county for the product. It fucked us over here for sure
Yeah, that’s the fairy tale they try to tell us because it sounds logical if you don’t look closer.
In reality those high energy prices are just a narrative (at least for Germany). Heavy industry pays average amounts in European comparison. It’s the private end consumer who’s getting poor from all the taxes and fees to subsidize cheap energy for the industry. Those are the same people whose real wages increased by ~25% in the last few decades while their real economic output in the same time frame increased by ~250%. And all that money is funneled off to a few ultra rich while pensions, social benefits and health care are linked to the stagnating wages.
The actual problem of Germany’s economy is that they systematically fucked over Germans for decades to optimise their trade output. So now when global demand is shifting there is no domestic demand to compensate because they are all fucking poor (compare: average wealth with median wealth) and squeezed by constantly increasing costs that in many cases just increase the profit margins of the very same companies they already subsidize with their taxes.
Added some charts for comparison (data from 2024-2025):
I imagine the same thing which finished off heavy industry in the U.K. is hurting DE a lot also, high energy prices.
Less of a direct effect on assembly businesses, but for heavy production where your process is largely to convert energy to product its devestating. Then you lose those job while also having to pay another county for the product. It fucked us over here for sure
Yeah, that’s the fairy tale they try to tell us because it sounds logical if you don’t look closer.
In reality those high energy prices are just a narrative (at least for Germany). Heavy industry pays average amounts in European comparison. It’s the private end consumer who’s getting poor from all the taxes and fees to subsidize cheap energy for the industry. Those are the same people whose real wages increased by ~25% in the last few decades while their real economic output in the same time frame increased by ~250%. And all that money is funneled off to a few ultra rich while pensions, social benefits and health care are linked to the stagnating wages.
The actual problem of Germany’s economy is that they systematically fucked over Germans for decades to optimise their trade output. So now when global demand is shifting there is no domestic demand to compensate because they are all fucking poor (compare: average wealth with median wealth) and squeezed by constantly increasing costs that in many cases just increase the profit margins of the very same companies they already subsidize with their taxes.
Added some charts for comparison (data from 2024-2025):
