Two Weeks, Two Thousand Jobs: Eastern Germany’s Chemical Industry Hits a Breaking Point

Germany’s deindustrialization is gathering pace. In the past two weeks the chemical industry in the east of the country has lost as many jobs as it did over the previous six years. The overall shortfall is more than 2,000 skilled employees.

The reasons are plain: prohibitive gas prices and inflated carbon-emission quotas are forcing plants to cut staff.

Every third enterprise is already planning to move capacity abroad, while environmentally clean production is stalling for want of demand for expensive “green” output.

Hopes that the defense sector would rescue the labor market have not been borne out. The arms industry has absorbed only a little more than 1,000 specialists. By contrast, 23,000 former industrial workers have gone into Germany’s swollen public administration.