I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made redundant and others are dependent on your salary - elderly care insurance - child care (could be better) - police that is not completely reduced to the absolute minimum - infrastructure that mostly works
All of this is not perfect by any means, but you do have the feeling to get something back for your deductions. YMMV In some other even well developed countries it often feels like public services run on a shoestring and are just enough not to collapse.
And some public services are in my opinion easier achieved if the state runs them, like infrastructure, transport, health and welfare services or police/security. You can go with private services and the lowest bidder but my feeling is that’s a downward spiral of what you get out of it in the end.
So if you feel you get adequate services or services that otherwise are difficult to achieve I think it’s ok to have a higher salary deduction. Obviously this is a quite subjective subject, not one sock fits all.
For example you can find German news articles about how public insurance doesn't cover some tests that confirm/deny if you have some life threatning condition or not, even if you have all the symptoms and the doctors says that's the next step - while private insurance does cover additional tests.
And private health insurance is only available to individuals earning well above the average German salary.
Source: me, capable of going private insurance but it’s a complete waste of money.
I am in the UK, we don't get medicine for some things because it is too expensive: HRT has been in shortage for years, we don't get most newer cancer drugs (it is unrelated to efficacy, it is just too expensive to treat people), epilepsy drugs are the same. Because drug prices here are so low, pharmacies get drugs, and then ship them to Europe to flip. I have relatives who are sick and don't get treated because it is NHS policy not to treat conditions properly (the most well-known one is CFS, the UK's approach to CFS/ME is...unique, and governed heavily by cost). And ofc, lots of money thrown into "cheaper interventions" like public health advertising (coincidentally, the people who run these campaigns are friends with people in the NHS...which is nice for them). Mental health is another area: too expensive, massive underinvestment, even today most of the mental health system is nurses who get a couple of weeks training from psychologists, psychologists are too expensive (somehow, almost no-one who studies psychology in the UK ends up doing clinical work).
There is no trade-off. Someone has to pay because doctors don't work for free. The US has a relatively optimal system with targeted universal healthcare that is heavily subsidised by the wealthy. Germany is a derivative of that system with a relatively large private component that subsidises the rest of the system. It is far better to overproduce healthcare for the wealthy, then underproduce it for everyone else. Ofc, "free healthcare" sounds very nice (unless doctors start working for free, the cost of a US public health system would largely be what it is already...Medicare and Medicaid is cheaper...but not by much because doctor and nurses, for one, are relatively well paid...in the UK, nurses make the equivalent of $25k, again no trade-offs).
My feeling is the NHS is a good institution in an unfortunate political culture. The UK is an essentially conservative state (they have been the ruling party for the vast majority of the last century) which is a poor fit for a pretty radical socialist healthcare system.
Also, the NHS is one of the only things on which there is almost no real political debate in the UK. The BMA is probably the most powerful lobbying group in British politics (and this isn't good, they are one of the more sources of stasis, they have opposed every change in health policy...they also opposed the introduction of the NHS). So the problem is the opposite: if anyone tries to reform the NHS is any way then the political opposition is instant (and the only way someone like Blair did reform at the edges, was to pay off doctors...which ended up costing massive amounts of money and leaving the system in a bigger hole). The main conservative force is the NHS itself...it isn't really radical, it is just a system that doesn't really work but Brits have this weird tribalism built up by tabloids telling people that someone is trying to privatize it (and btw, this is the conclusion of anyone with a brain...the NHS doesn't work well, the wealthy and middle-class need to subsidise the system more heavily but people want a Nordic size state with US taxes...and btw, what people don't understand is that we have US taxes with a public health system that is half the size of the US public health system...so we don't even do that properly). I also wouldn't call it "socialist" either, there is no real subsidy, US healthcare is way more redistributive, it is universal but lots of other healthcare systems in Europe achieve universality with large private systems...so universality really isn't the dealbreaker that people in the US think it is. But most people are die-hard NHS supporters, so it clearly isn't "socialist".
Sajid Javid literally reads The Fountainhead twice a year - and he's not much more neoliberal than his predecessors.
My feeling is it's hard to succeed as an organization when your boss really would like your organization to fail so the free market can step in. And that's been the NHS's situation for most of its history.
Nonetheless, there are inherent inefficiencies of private healthcare, even subsidized private healthcare, in that it results in horrific paperwork multiplication and information siloing. In germany, where I live, the amount of paperwork you need to get insurance is insane. There are literally offices full of people in every city doing basically senseless work just to make sure people don't get more healthcare than what they paid for. It's also a strong reason why the UK had such an easy time doing a vaccine rollout - the NHS could just send everybody who was in x age a letter. They also pay far less for medication, because the negotiating position is much stronger.
Sure, you can't get a homeopathic suppository from your heilpraktiker, or give birth in a giant bath that's shaped like a vagina, but it delivers a good service for a low price.
The view that the NHS is being stitched up is another common conspiracy theory that is "common knowledge" and totally wrong. The NHS (and the BMA, particularly) have been given all the rope needed to hang themselves. Attributing malice to incompetence is at the root of most conspiracy theories.
An inefficient system that achieves patient outcomes that are many times better than the UK. I would take that any day. It is great to sit in a country that can provide good healthcare and marvel at ideological purity (it isn't ideological purity, it is conservative/reactionary thinking that drives everything in the NHS)...it is less great to actually be in that country, and be sick and not get treated. The UK achieves good outcomes given the cost...but that cost is very low and the outcomes are also very low (the UK's healthcare system is more comparable with middle-income countries, we are nowhere near most developed countries...and nowhere close to a top rank country like Germany). And btw, the UK is massively inefficient...we overpay massively for doctors (our wages are roughly equal to Germany), there are reams of middle managers in the NHS, any system will have inefficiency (and it is far more dangerous to have inefficiency in a system that isn't redistributive like the UK because it is largely poor people who pay for it).
And no, it isn't about insufficient homeopathy. I don't think people who have healthcare understand what it is like to have none. I am sick right now, I don't get treatment (in one case, the waiting list is too long, and in the other the cost is too high for the NHS to treat people). Most of my relatives that are sick, have either had bad treatment at one point that has almost resulted in death (in one case, multiple times) or don't get treatment for anything but basic illness (and then it is usually bad: for example, doctors will prescribe insulin for overweight people with type 2 diabetes because actually getting people to lose weight is too expensive...the UK also loves "public health" programmes because they are cheap, they don't work either but they are cheap). You call up for emergency treatment, you will wait 6-12 hours for help, and when you get taken to a hospital you can wait as long as a day to be admitted (most stats that are reported on this are fake, the hospital local to me has always hit their four hour target, I have waited in their four hours when it has been totally empty...it was recently discovered that all their stats were being faked by management). If I need to speak to my GP, there is so much demand that I need to call at 8 in the morning, by half 8 there are no more slots. If I do call at 8 then I will be triaged by someone with no medical training, and likely told that I can't speak to anyone. If you do go to a GP, you likely won't get referred to a specialist if the cost is too high (a big category here is mental health, people usually come into the system only once they attempt to kill themselves/have a psychotic episode/etc.). If you do get referred, you will likely be waiting months or years. If you need medicine, it will be low-cost and anything complex is either not available at all or is sold into markets like Germany with higher drug prices by UK pharmacies (for example, most cancer drugs aren't available...it is why the UK has the worst stats on cancer treatment in the developed world, by far...same for epilepsy). And the vast majority of GPs are exceptionally bad at their job. I have moved around the UK, I have had maybe 10-25 GPs, most are clueless...as an example, I know someone who had a stroke, and the GP wouldn't refer to a stroke clinic (and btw, because obesity/strokes are so common, they just give you drugs because everything else is too expensive). I don't actually know anyone who has had a high level of contact with the NHS who has a positive opinion of the level of care (this includes people working for the NHS too btw, the support that people have is mostly theoretical...until they get sick, and realise how bad it is).
I am aware of the meme about German doctors. But what you don't see is that waste is a sign that things are working (and btw, the UK still wastes more than anyone, I am in favour of wasting money on doctors...if the outcomes are there, but they aren't and nurses get paid starvation wages because of this overspend). If you attempt to reduce all waste in healthcare, people die. It isn't like other things.
Now you do you have to count with some other potential expenses, like covering up to 6 weeks paid sick leave. I’m spire there’s some rule of thumb how to average that over a workforce but I’m not aware of it.
Dresden child care is specifically good and affordable, probably due to Eastern German (Socialist) heritage.
It's also has one of the highest number of kids per family.
Where in Germany is that?
You either pay a lot for private insurance (especially when you get old) or you pay a lot for state-backed insurance (which is a lot if you earn above average as most techies do).
For comparison in California, a 35-year-old SF resident earning $250k/yr living alone purchasing insurance through the public marketplace can get a Platinum-level Kaiser Permanente HMO plan for around $650/mo (but over $2000/mo for a family of four).
YMMV but I've found KP's service quality to be extremely high, and that plan comes with $0 annual deductible and very low copays.
For that, kids (no matter how many) are covered unless the other parent has a private insurance. Spouses are covered if they don't have their own insurance.
Based in Germany, I'd say the best part of it is that it's truly social: The healthy ones pay for the sick ones, all with the same tariff, no questions asked. That's especially true for people who become sick, old, or both: For them, private insurances tend to raise their tariffs exponentially, and there's no way to get an affordable insurance any longer.
- You get that same coverage level at any income.
- There's no co-pay on anything (with some exceptions for higher-end elective dental work, e.g. if you want an implant instead of a bridge). What something costs is never a factor in treatment. The doctors simply decide what they think is appropriate.
- Prices, again, at the same coverage level, drop down to next to nothing if you have no income. I paid €1,400/year when I was living on savings and starting my company.
Multiple studies have shown that Kaiser is more efficient and effective than the UK NHS for about the same cost.
Examples:
Does the employer pay any of that? Is that the total for the entire family?
If any family member works full-time, then they have to cover their own health insurance. Exceptions apply.
If you make more than 40.000 EUR / year you have the option to get a private insurance policy with more "benefits". Then, the employer will pay out the amount that went to the public health system and you will use it (and whatever you can afford on top) to your private health insurance.
When you go private, you're in the wild west, meaning you'll need to be extremely cautious of what contracts you sign. Or you'll end up with a 3000 EUR per month plan at old age, with no way back into the public system.
Many people end up poor after retirement because their whole 401k and savings go towards the health insurance which is way to luxurious for their needs and isn't capped.
But I don't get why I got downvoted for pointing out that it's not free, when that's 100% true.
750EUR public (which doesn't cover everything) or depending on age anywhere from 400 to 1500EUR private isn't "free healthcare". That's on top of high taxes etc.
Germany has a lot of great things. Free healthcare ain't one of them. Let's stay honest.
You are right that it doesn't cover everything, but in my experience these are primarily things where there is a high level of own influence or electivness (dental implants, lasik, glasses) and or cost/benefit isn't proven. Since a basic level of care is provided I don't mind that.
If I'd have the choice between US and Germany, I'd probably prefer the old Europe model.
If I were American, a part of my net income would still end up going to health insurance, student loans and other things. My employer might pay less benefits, but pay a higher salary to compensate for those costs.
I think that a direct comparison is very difficult in that regard. That doesn't even include different expectations regarding work life balance, and legal requirements regarding parental leave and sick leave.
While that's true, above-average earners like engineers/doctors/laywers definitely come on top in the US. Also for most of these people health insurance is paid for by the company.
The trade-off is for everyone else basically, who get a much shittier deal in the US compared to what they would get in any EU country.
Skilled US jobs pay more, no matter how you look at it. I'm just thinking that above a certain income level, other perks become a lot more valuable.
I have nearly unlimited free time now, and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming to an office. Even if you doubled my salary, I wouldn't go back to 2-3 weeks of vacation like my parents back in Canada. The extra 3 weeks I got when I moved to Germany were life-changing.
There's are also finer points about the differences in work culture, but that's not really a guarantee. There are plenty of overworked Germans, even if they're allegedly rarer.
It's really hard to compare what amounts to different values. It's just important to understand that total income isn't the only thing employees are chasing, especially if it involves relocating to a different continent.
- 400k salary
- 4 weeks of vacation + 12 holidays (low by EU standards but not by much)
- Free top tier health insurance for family
I agree 6 weeks is nice, but usually employers will let you take an extra week or two unpaid if you want the extra time.
It usually goes like this:
US tech salaries are great, but you have no health insurance. Or: yeah but you have to pay $12,000 per year for your own health insurance, so you have to deduct that to get a fair accounting on salaries.
When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.
Which is another way of saying that US salaries would be even further beyond peers if one takes an accurate accounting of the health insurance benefit + taxes.
Once you go through the effort of pointing all of this out, then they'll revert to: yeah but the quality of life is still superior so there. Having watched that forever process here across more than a decade, I've learned that people - even intelligent, seemingly knowledgeable people - often just shoehorn whatever lies or false narratives they need to feel good about their context when they lay their head on the pillow at night. And that's why no matter how many times it's corrected, the false narrative in question will never end.
Just the fact that you need to add the "in tech" to me suggests that US system isn't that great. It's pretty good, assuming you're in tech. The other problem is that when you look at your W-2, you can see how much your employer pays for your health insurance - this is the amount that you should also treat like a tax, even if you do want to add it to the total comp (it's money your employer spends on you that you don't get to see). The fair way to compare wages & tax rates would be to look at the total cost of employing a person vs how much of that money this person actually gets. And even then there's VAT & sales tax that needs to be taken into account...
Are there any sites that attempt to do those kinds of analyses / comparisons?
As long as you don't get fired and as long as you don't get sick. But yeah. If you are young, healthy and in tech you have good health insurance in the US. Congratulations.
So, maybe, when we foreigners talk about this aspect of the US healthcare system we understand completely how it works and just don't see it as equivalent.
A big figure on the pay slip is a status symbol. If Germany wants to attract foreign high-profile human capital like the US does, they should create a similar system: Pay them their full salary without deductions, and then charge them the mandatory cost instead of their employers. It could work wonders.
Each of these deductions are clearly shown on your pay slips. They can be calculated in advance from your gross income.
In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low.
In any case, it's impossible to have a balanced view on compensation, because of the huge differences between the countries you compare. I lived 6 years and Germany and the rest of my life in Canada. I still wouldn't venture to compare what a salary means in either country.
So the employee sees the huge number being transferred into his account. He can go on the internet and brag about how great salaries in Germany are.
Also, you are wrong here: "Reduced by half because of employer contributions". This only applies to very specific insurances like private pension funds, where there's a split.
Costs for health care aren't split like that, the employer deducts the full amount.
But thanks for the patronising comment. American?
I typed 100k/year into brutto-netto-rechner and it shows that Netto is less than 65k. Basically over 35% of your salary gets confiscated by the state, of course this doesn't include further taxes like 19% VAT you pay every time you buy anything at all.
How is that "relatively low"?
Unless you find aliens or a time machine to shift goods and also services through time, always and everywhere the currently working take care of the current pensioners. There is nothing "Ponzi" about it, that is the universe.
People who pay now do not pay for their future pension, they pay for the current pensioners. What is transmitted to the future - when they become pensioners - is not what they pay now, it is merely information. That information is then taken into account when the then living and working working people pay the pensions of the then pensioners. The information about how much somebody contributed in the past is taken into consideration to see how much a share of the overall pie everyone gets, but the pie itself always is created in the present by whoever works now.
Which also makes the headlines a little silly that claim that because in the future there will be more of an imbalance between nr. of people working and those getting a pension something needs to be changed now. It makes no sense: The current payments into the system immediately go to the current pensioners. If there are less paying and/or more receiving the funds that can and is always balanced at whatever the current time is. There is no need to do anything now when the current payments are enough to pay the current pensioners. If next year there is an imbalance they adjust what the payments (in and out) are at that time. It makes no sense to change payments now when the problem is not right now.
Any finance-based scheme cannot undo the universe (except, aliens helping out or time machine). "Private" funds change nothing of the underlaying truth that current pensioners live from what current workers produce in both goods an services. It only changes who is responsible: More winners and losers (and then "it's your own fault, why did you not buy stocks - the right stocks too of course") with the finance based system, with one huge winner the financial industry.
Also, you still end up paying for all those things. And private health insurance will simply always be more expensive
Klause-Michel Kuehne scaled from Germany's economic size to the US economic size would go from $37b in wealth to $195b. That's Jeff Bezos.
Dieter Schwarz scaled similarly would go from $26b to $135b. That's Bill Gates.
Susanne Klatten scaled similarly would go from $24.6b to $128b. That's Zuckerberg.
Thomas and Andreas Struengmann scaled similarly would each go from $21b to $109b. That's Warren Buffett.
Stefan Quandt scaled similarly would go from $21b to $109b. That's Steve Ballmer.
And so on. Germany has 30 of the top 500 largest individual fortunes globally; the US has 159. Interestingly that's the approximately correct scaling if you account for the difference in economic size (although one would expect it to increase even further with scale, and given the US also has other things in its favor (eg global reserve currency, military superpower); so Germany is more than pulling its weight in relation to the number of US billionaires at the top). Overall Germany had 153 billionaires as recently as 2019, while the US had 788 that year; once again that scales roughly correctly for the difference in economy size.
So yes, the incredible wealth at the top in Germany is every bit as lopsided considering the size of the German economy.
Germany's median wealth figure is below the US. That's despite the US massively debasing its median with tens of millions of poor immigrants from Latin America over the past 40 years (meaning those people are starting from scratch, typically with no valuable labor skills or education background, and often without even knowing English). Comparing apples to apples, US demographics to Germany demographics, US white people are drastically richer than German white people at the median. And it's also despite the US not having the much vaunted labor protection that the Germans enjoy.
Germany, given its immense economic output, relatively stable culture and politics, high productivity, and strong labor protection, should have extraordinary wealth at the median. It doesn't (France and Britain both far exceed Germany in that regard; Germany is only slightly ahead of Portugal by comparison).
Chip making isn't clean by any standard.
Based on what? Tesla makes extensive use of an existing capability to move on development with per-approval.
They have not received any kind of politicians helping them to avoid bureaucracy that I know of. Some local politicians have talked in support but the bureaucracy is just moving at its normal pace.
I guess they paid a fine for installing a few tanks to early but that seems like a planning issue, not some kind of 'we gone install the 2 tanks because we have political backing'.
Its not like the plant is majorly behind.
> Turns out not every country is as corrupt as Tesla's home country.
Again, based on what? What corrupt thing did Tesla do in Texas that is so different? Texas doesn't require a public meeting for input but the overall process is not actually that different.
Maybe the standards are different, but it doesn't have anything to do with corruption.
And state politics, especially in the east, is rife with people using it as a stepping stone to the federal level. Famously there once were more prime ministers from the west governing the east than eastern-born ones.
While the original plan seemed to aim for starting production without a local battery plant this summer, there is no sign of starting production yet. On the other side, they already started to build a giant concrete foundation for what looks like a battery plant, this might come much earlier as initially planned. And this proceeds, like most other parts of the factory, at a very quick speed.
Germany has strict environmental regulations, but most places in the world have those by now. As long as you plan to fulfill the regulations, there should be no reason not to build in Germany.
Tangent: how can environmental groups be against an electric car manufacturer? You would think they’re somewhat fighting the same fight?
- The location has a unique/endangered flora or fauna and building in the specific location would be a significant blow to those species.
- Ground water issues when a large area is paved, roofed or otherwise covered.
- Noise/light pollution affecting nearby residential and/or environmental areas.
- Increased traffic though connecting roads causing related issues.
It's as far as I see never about the specific industry building in the place, but rather the local effects of building in the area that need to be addressed.
They are building a factory as fast as possible, pushing the authorities to work as fast as possible and until now they only had minor difficulties which each other, considering how hard Tesla is pushing and how "slow" German bureaucracy is.
And the Tesla story of ... Tesla getting quite generous permissions to rush-build a factory, Tesla rush-building the factory, sometimes going over what#s permitted and thus having some minor squabbles with the local authorities? That "story"?
That seems like it could've been avoided, since Brandenburg doesn't have that many Wasserschutzgebiete: https://maps.brandenburg.de/apps/Wasserschutzgebiete/ (The WSG Erkner/Neu Zittau is the big blob south of Erkner, southeast of Berlin. If you zoom in far enough, you can see Tesla's factory at the blob's eastern border.)
The location they ended up with, was suggested by the government of Brandenburg. It was one of a few locations.
And selecting a location has many, many, many factors. Tesla simply decided that the extra cost for that environment was less important then the other factors. Such as transportation infrastructure and likely many others.
Simply suggesting that they didn't know what they were doing because of the location they picked is not really defensible.
We also have no indication that the regulatory approval is delayed because of that specific issue.
The real downside of Germany is lead Engineer is a non-union position so you end up with the majority of your engineers refusing to lead the project (despite the higher salaries, the union benefits are considered worth it - as an outsider I don't know what these are). Thus you end up with a lot of great mid-level engineers who try to stick to their own area of expertise instead of growing to make a better whole.
So, there's big deficit of experienced engineers. German companies are trying to solve it by inviting Eastern European/Indian/Asian workers, that are cheaper, but that results in mediocre one staying and exploiting job security system and good ones moving to Switzerland/US or back to native country(where foreign experience can help them to get to higher managerial positions).
Engineering salaries in Germany are high compared to most of western Europe.
The above is about great engineers who are holding themselves back. I have no doubt that those who are willing to not be in the union are also willing to leave the country leading to some brain drain, but many are also holding themselves back as well.
It is hard to tell if you are in a better or worse situation as a developer when you work in such a company. Many employees in such companies would like to have a 40-hour week, because that would result in higher pay. Unions, however, push to allow 40-hour weeks only to a small percentage of the workforce on the grounds that if the workload is higher, it should be compensated by new hires instead of overtime for existing employees, since more employees also means more union members and thus more power for unions.
What country are you talking about?
4.3 % pay increase for all employees in 2018, 2.0 % in 2017, 2.8 % in 2016, 2.2 % in 2014, 3.4 % in 2013, etc.
In addition, there are individually agreed salary increases depending performance.
[1] https://www.igmetall.de/ueber-uns/geschichte/die-tariferfolg...
Now, this may be a complete misconception, but that's what my perception of doing business in Germany is.
For this kind of automated high-tech manufacturing, nobody cares about salaries. They are <<1% of the cost.