Employment in Germany 1984 to 2019: Between stability and change (original) (raw)

The economic system is one of the functional systems of modern societies (Runkel/Burkart 2005). The system of employment links individual actors (as employed persons) to the economic system (Schramm 1992). It forms a social interface between business and education (vocational qualifications), politics (industrial relations), law (individual and collective law), etc. It also forms an interface between the basic elements of society: action systems (personal and social systems), social structure and social semantics (culture and knowledge), living environments (working world). The world of work is a place of shared experiences of the actors, of individual and collective socialization as well as the reproduction of social structure and semantics. The (segmented) labour market distributes not only roles and positions in the employment system, but also social opportunities and risks (Schlese/Schramm 1994). In this article, the employment system is described over time with the help of data from the SocioEconomic Panel (Schramm 1999). The SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP) is one of the largest and longest-running multidisciplinary household surveys worldwide. Every year, approximately 30,000 people in 15,000 households are interviewed for the SOEP study. The SOEP is also a research-driven infrastructure based at DIW Berlin (https://www.diw.de/en/ diw_01.c.392080.en/mission.html). The change in the German employment system over time can be described with a few important indicators: employable and active persons in relation to the resident population, forms of employment, required skills in the workplace, level of employment (by gender) and stability of employment. The design of the SOEP is extensively presented on the Internet. As a method for answering the research question, the descriptive presentation of extrapolated case numbers was chosen. The limits of research lie firstly in the collection of the sample and the quality of the extrapolation. In addition, panel effects cannot be ruled out. Secondly, these are statements by those affected, which does not exclude