Workers are rare. This is also a problem for the Weissenhäuser Strand holiday park. Will the boss find new employees in Madagascar? ****************************** The lack of workers has become a question of survival for the Weissenhäuser Strand holiday and leisure park on the Baltic Sea: There are virtually no applicants for the vacancies. Managing Director David Depenau is therefore taking an unusual approach: Several times a year, he flies to countries outside the EU to recruit workers. But although politicians know that they cannot do without skilled foreign workers, David Depenau and his colleagues in the HR department are encountering high bureaucratic hurdles. NDR reporters Laura Borchardt and Julia Saldenholz accompanied Depenau and his team for several months on their difficult search for workers. Lots of young people, hardly any jobs in Madagascar A 14-hour flight is behind him when David Depenau lands in Antananarivo in June 2023. In the capital of the African island state of Madagascar, he wants to recruit apprentices for his company on the Baltic coast of Schleswig-Holstein. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, with many young people and hardly any jobs. In Germany, the situation is exactly the opposite: at the end of 2022, the Federal Employment Agency reported almost two million vacancies, more than ever before. David Depenau can no longer fill his own apprenticeships with domestic applicants. In Antananarivo, he meets young people who are investing a lot in order to be able to do an apprenticeship in Germany. They learn German at Angelique Steffeck's language school. They pay around 50 euros a month for this, which is a month's wage in Madagascar. The hope: an apprenticeship in Germany. David Depenau will give six of them a contract. Politicians must continue to open the doors to workers Anyone who wants to come to Germany from a non-EU country to work must meet a variety of criteria and provide various proofs for a visa. Christine Hartmann, who is responsible for human resources at Weissenhäuser Strand, is busy every day trying to find a way through the jungle of different procedures and regulations. She keeps encountering overworked and overwhelmed employees in the authorities. The consequence: the procedures drag on and applicants drop out. Workers from abroad are urgently needed Yet her company, like so many companies in Germany, urgently needs workers from abroad. The hotel would like to offer a Thai massage in its wellness area. And who could do that better than Thai masseurs and masseuses trained at a recognized university in Bangkok? Christine Hartmann has been trying to bring two of them to Germany for a year. She has not succeeded, partly because the recognition of the university degree is so complicated. The recruitment of an Indian chef and a Kenyan woman who the company would like to employ has also stalled. Despite assurances to the contrary, politicians are not taking the issue seriously enough, criticizes David Depenau. He demands that politicians should open the doors further. The new skilled worker immigration law, which the German Bundestag passed in the summer of 2023, does not go far enough. LINK: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/ku... The six prospective trainees from Madagascar at least get a visa for Germany and begin their training in the Weissenhäuser Strand holiday and leisure park. It is the first cold winter for them, the first long separation from their families and the start of a new life. #SkillsShortage #Jobs #JobMarket