Abstract
Abstract Mass unemployment in Germany has built up since the seventies. There is, therefore, an urgent need to explore its historical background for an adequate diagnosis. This article starts from the hypothesis, that it is the inconsistency between the qualification profiles of the German production mode and the state of the labour market, which offers the main reason for structural unemployment in Germany since its beginning in the little world economic crises of the seventies. It has been the break down of fordism in German industry so the starting point of the analysis that opened up the gap between a large low qualification sector of a fordist labour market and a dramatically shrinking offer of this kind of jobs. After the global decline of fordist production German government stopped the recruitment of ‘guest workers’ in 1972. Notwithstanding this step, the share of unqualified labour continued to rise. It was not before the 1990s that the level of qualification was rising again. However, this process which is still going on is by far not fast enough to meet the classical pattern of post industrial quality production, which dominated German economic development before and after the fordist interlude.
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