🇩🇪 Germany

Germany's entire labour market narrative is migration-laundered cope. With a median age of 45.7 and an old-age dependency ratio approaching 36%, the native workforce is shrinking by roughly 300,000–500,000 per year — and would be in outright demographic collapse without the steady influx of Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, Syrians, and increasingly Afghans filling warehouse, logistics, care, and service jobs. These are precisely the categories that warehouse robotics, autonomous driving, and AI-driven care-tech will eliminate first. Youth unemployment at 7.1% looks healthy until you realise it is propped up by the same imported-labour elasticity that AI will deflate — Germany doesn't have a labour shortage, it has a labour dependency, and the drug is about to be reformulated.

Germany's industrial policy remains fixated on preserving legacy sectors via Kurzarbeit (short-time work) subsidies that pay workers to maintain zombie roles rather than reskill. The Merz government has signalled some AI acceleration and a €500bn infrastructure fund, but the regulatory apparatus still treats AI as a threat to be governed rather than a transition to be managed. There is no serious national retraining scheme at the scale required — the Bundesagentur für Arbeit's reskilling budgets are a rounding error against the millions of automotive and clerical jobs facing displacement by 2030.