October 17, 2011
Just in case you were wondering, work share looks like it’s doing pretty damn good in Germany, the country that has embraced it most aggressively. Since the downturn began in the fourth quarter of 2007 Germany’s GDP growth has been only slightly better than in the U.S. However, while our unemployment rate rose from 4.8 percent in the 4th quarter of 2007 to 9.1 percent in the most recent quarter, Germany’s unemployment rate fell from 8.3 percent to 6.0 percent for the same period. (The German unemployment data for the third quarter of 2011 does not include September.)
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Source: OECD.
In fairness, work sharing is not the whole story. Germany has other programs that encourage employers to keep workers on the payroll. Germany also has a slower growing workforce, so it takes less GDP growth to keep pace with its underlying population growth. Still the contrast between Germany’s 2.3 percentage point decline in unemployment and the 4.3 percentage point rise in the U.S. is rather striking.
