The director of the Federal Employment Agency, Frank-Jürgen Weise, spoke out against the idea of prematurely opening the German labor market to migrants from Eastern European EU states. "The agency's branches are still full of unemployed people," he told the Berliner Zeitung. "Increased competition would significantly complicate their job placement."
The initiative to liberalize the labor market was recently put forward by the Ministry of Labor, headed by Social Democrat Franz Müntefering. This measure could partially solve the problem of a shortage of personnel, which representatives of several economic sectors complain about. Currently, Germany has a restriction on labor migration of citizens from the "new" EU states, introduced after the first wave of EU enlargement in 2004. In May 2009, when the restriction expires, the government can extend it for another two years.
Conservatives support this measure. As the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Volker Kauder, told the newspaper Bild, one cannot complain about dumping wages and at the same time attract "millions of labor migrants from Bulgaria and Romania." To prevent a drop in tariffs, the Social Democrats propose introducing a minimum wage in sectors that will be opened to foreign labor. However, the conservatives fundamentally oppose legislative regulation of wages.
The head of the Employment Agency considers it expedient to open selected sectors, but emphasizes that the admission of migrants must be strictly controlled. Otherwise, Germany faces an influx of low-skilled cheap labor, warns Frank-Jürgen Weise.