Refugees fail to enter German job market

Germany’s blue-chip companies will have to explain to Chancellor Angela Merkel tomorrow why they have managed to hire fewer than 100 refugees after around a million arrived in the country last year.

Merkel, fighting for her political life over her open-door policy, has summoned the bosses of some of Germany’s biggest companies to Berlin to account for their lack of action and exchange ideas about how they can do better.

Many of the companies say a lack of German-language skills, the inability of most refugees to prove any qualifications, and uncertainty about their permission to stay in the country mean there is little they can do in the short term.

A survey by Reuters of the 30 companies in Germany’s DAX stock market index found they could point to just 63 refugee hires in total. Several of the 26 firms who responded said they considered it discriminatory to ask about applicants’ migration history, so they did not know whether they employed refugees or how many.

Of the 63 hires, 50 are employed by Deutsche Post DHL, which said it applied a “pragmatic approach” and deployed the refugees to sort and deliver letters and parcels.

“Given that around 80 per cent of asylum seekers are not highly qualified and may not yet have a high level of German proficiency, we have primarily offered jobs that do not require technical skills or a considerable amount of interaction in German,” a spokesman said by email.

It’s simply too soon to expect large numbers of refugees to have been hired yet, most German companies say.

“Our experience is that it takes a minimum of 18 months for a well-trained refugee to go through the asylum procedure and learn German at an adequate level in order to apply for a job,” said a spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom, which plans to take on about 75 refugees as apprentices this year but has not made a permanent hire.

Others among Germany’s top listed companies, mainly in the financial or airline sectors, say it is practically impossible for them to take on refugees at all. They cite regulatory reasons such as the need for detailed background checks on staff.

Many large companies see the main benefits of the migrant influx as an opportunity to introduce more diversity into their workforce and to bring their staff into personal contact with refugees.

About 346,000 people with asylum status were seeking jobs in Germany in August, according to the latest figures from the German Labour Office, up from 322,000 in July and 297,000 in June, the first month for which it published such statistics.