Comments by "T J" (@TJ-hs1qm) on "Type Ashton"
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They experienced capitalism firsthand. Essentially, people in their 20s and particularly women, adapted quickly by migrating to the West. Everyone else left behind became jobless. Productivity in the West was high at the time (fewer people did more work thanks to automation and cheap labor costs). There weren't enough jobs. Even before unification, German companies in the West offloaded production lines to the East to profit from an even cheaper workforce there. But with the new influx of new East German workers, they became economically superfluous overnight, at least when held against the former West German wage standards. So this prompted the government to quickly dismantle the entire post-WWII social security system and replace it with Hartz IV, raise the retirement age, and introduce a new class of low-wage workers (1 Euro Jobber). Ironically, the main motivation why East Germans wanted unification disappeared, because the wage standard of East Germany was more or less made the new standard for all, allowing companies to continue access to cheap labor in the unified country. So, contrary to popular belief, unification went both ways, but maybe not in everyone's best interest. While in theory, everyone could now board a plane and travel anywhere they liked, they wouldn't be able to afford it. By the time, all this was also being justified by the free-market liberal theories of the Thatcher, Reagan, Blair era, everyone was pushing for lower wages, including the unions themselves. The new economics made German companies again highly profitable, but it created other problems for countries in Europe who couldn't keep lowering their wages, and that contributed to the unemployment rate in neighboring France and Italy. And so on and so forth...
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