Part of this issue goes back over 10 to 20 years (before the refugee issue ever arose). There is a stagnation of salaries. Companies rarely do pay-raises, and people rarely flip or switch jobs. So you find “Hans” sitting there at age 40 and having worked 23 years for such-and-such company, and only having 3 pay-raises in that entire period.
Toss in a fragile market for company survival, increasing cost-of-living situations, taxation....and you have risk for the middle-class worker.
You have a fair number of people waking up around age 60 now and realizing that their pension will only be in the 700 to 800 Euro range...nowhere near enough for any decent retirement....so they have to plan on working to 68, and maybe even have a part-time job after that. Poverty-pensioners are now a weekly topic on German TV, and the government can only work up welfare-supplements to help cover this mess.
On the immigrant addition, few Germans grasp the massive problem that they’ve created. If you have 100,000 guys show up who are 24-to-30 years old...well, they might get jobs and help to contribute into some pension pot for themselves....BUT there almost ten years of contributions that they missed out on. So in 40-odd years when they retire...they will be missing 20-to-30 percent of what a normal German will have on pensions. How will they make up for that? Massive usage of tax-revenue for welfare supplements. It’ll cost billions per year to cover what they didn’t contribute into the pot. Not a single political figure in Germany will talk to that one simple point.
Im thinking that the imported 24-30 year olds are vastly less skilled and productive than native Germans, and will never approach German productivity.
And that they will also have a multiple of the native German unemployment rate.
These sorts of things are a bigger deal than even missing some years of pension contributions.
You are right about Germans being surprisingly poorly paid, vs their reputation for productivity.