Don't Want to Work - Possible Reasons

In Germany, the typical eight-hour workday, not counting breaks and commute, is exhausting - most employees, civil servants and self-employed people will confirm that. Millions of working people in Germany even put in far more than 40 hours a week. Quite a few also see a purpose in it that goes beyond income, in other words earning a living: validation, building and maintaining social contacts, feeling needed, cooperating in a group, even a meaning in life.Other people, in turn, don't want to work. To live above the ALG II level (Germany's basic unemployment benefit), most of them go along with it. But there are also long-term unemployed people who either have no prospects because of a lack of qualifications, disability, age, or physical or mental illness, as well as people who do not take up paid work out of a particular conviction. Two possible reasons are briefly explained below.

[caption id="attachment_170" align="alignright" width="300"]Work is no fun Unmotivated at work[/caption]

Protest Against Capitalist Exploitation

People whose qualifications are in low demand on the job market, in particular, can develop a real attitude of inner protest against wage labor. This can affect academics too, although the unemployment rate for people with degrees is far lower.

Anyone who has ever worked as a "helper" for a temp agency, for example as a warehouse worker, order picker, packer, sorter or similar, especially before the introduction of the minimum wage in Germany, can understand such an attitude better than someone who, lacking firsthand experience, doesn't even consider such jobs possible. Don't want to work? No wonder! These jobs come not only with poor pay, but also with the demand for the greatest possible flexibility from workers.

The temp agency can easily send you to five different workplaces within a single week. The new coworkers at each one often don't even bother to learn the "new guy's" name, and because of bad experiences with temp workers, the treatment may be lousy too. On top of everything, negative hours can pile up, which means the pay has to be topped up with additional ALG II. It's understandable that an anti-work attitude takes hold under such conditions.

Upbringing / Lack of Education / Missing Role Models

The image of the stupid, lazy unemployed person, which various TV shows like to spread in a voyeuristic way, is of course a cliché that rarely holds true. Yet in some regions of Germany (East and West alike) you really do find milieus that have made "I don't want to work" their life motto. There is a real danger that unemployment gets passed down from generation to generation. When children see their parents on the couch in front of the TV every day, the impression forms that this is completely normal and okay. You can observe this in families with little education that organize their daily lives around ALG II and thereby also rob their children of opportunities to develop.

Quite apart from the fact that the ALG II standard rate was not set according to scientific criteria and is too low for a dignified life with social participation, parents should try to be role models. That includes contributing their talents to society and showing their children a work ethic by example. "I don't want to work" can have a decisively negative influence on an entire young person's life.