Working in eastern Germany is still unprofitable
The online portal Gehalt.de compared data on labor income voluntarily provided by almost 340,000 of its users, who indicated the cities and states where they receive their salaries. As Russkaya Germaniya notes, in western Germany they turned out to be about a quarter higher.
All statistical data on salaries are no older than one year. Depending on the industry, the difference between west and east may be even higher. It is highest in the field of information technology and radio electronics – here the difference reaches 31%. For programmers it is lower – about 17%, but nevertheless also quite significant.
The only exception in the east is Berlin: the trendy but debt-ridden capital of the country can afford to pay specialists an average salary of 41,020 euros per year, which is 10% higher than the income of colleagues in the other new German states.
In 2018, the federal government will begin the long-awaited process of equalizing western and eastern pensions. Last week, a draft law was prepared according to which the size of pensions in the old and new states should become the same by 2025. In the area of salaries, legislative regulation is impossible and counterproductive, which means that the difference in remuneration for the same work in the west and east of Germany will persist for many years to come.
The reason for this inequality, experts believe, lies in the economic legacy of the GDR: it is expressed in the absence of large system-forming enterprises, of which there are enough in the west of the country. Small and medium-sized businesses, mainly represented in the east of the country, are unable to pay salaries comparable to those in the west.