Berlin Public attention is currently focussing on a professional group that rarely receives so much attention: “Deskless workers”, i.e. people who have to be physically present at their place of work. They include employees in classic minimum-wage jobs such as porters, waitresses or security inspectors at airports. Thousands of people are missing in Germany right now – and are causing chaos at German airports or long waiting times in restaurants.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which is available to the Handelsblatt, shows that the shortage of workers is likely to become even more serious in the near future. A third of the 1,000 deskless workers surveyed in Germany want to change jobs in the next six months.

The waiters, cleaning staff and saleswomen who are willing to give up their jobs are exacerbating an already glaring shortage of staff in their wage sector. An evaluation by the job platform Indeed for the Handelsblatt, for example, shows that the proportion of waiter jobs advertised there in June of this year was 137 percent above the same month last year.