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Comment by easychris | Hacker News Reader

> It is fine to force 70 year old pensioners to clean toilets

No one forces these 70 years olds to work there. I honestly believe that the people who do are happy to be able to earn some money (because they may not find a "better" job).

In Germany no one is really forced to accept a job because of the reasonable good-enough social benefits / welfare systems (not saying that you can live a good life with it though).

Anyway, you probably didn't want to discuss a real issue but rather spread your, umh, questionable ideas about the "army" of immigrants. :-/

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I'm not familiar with German Welfare but in the UK we have means tested welfare. It is a wicked poverty trap

If you earn £1 you lose £1 of welfare.

So if you want to do a hour a day of toilet maintenance you need either a very strong sense of community or another income.

One of the reasons a Negative Income Tax might work better than means tested benefits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

In Germany it is not entirely 1:1. If you receive Hartz4 unemployment (€404) and have a so called €450-minijob (which is the cutoff for social security taxes etc), then €170 are additional income and €280 are offset with you unemployment, giving you €574 overall.

At least that's how I understood the mechanics just now, having never been forced to actually understand them.

One of the reasons you find the elderly employed doing small jobs in places like Japan and South Korea is that there is very little social safety net. The system is setup to assume that the elderly will simply live at home with their adult children. They usually receive a very small pension of some sort and various other discounts on public services (subsidized mass transit for example).

However, if they don't find themselves in a situation where they can live at home with their children, there's very little alternative for them.

70 year olds who don't have enough money to retire and can't find a better job are forced to work there.

Retirement age in Japan and Germany is around 65 years. Not everyone qualifies for social benefits (owns house, work history...). And regions like Bavaria are bloody expensive. So yes, some pensioners have to work even in Germany (but it was about Japan in reference to old people).

I would be happy to discus my "questionable ideas". I live in Athens and I actually tried to hire some of them for manual labor. Most of them had better shoes than me, were lazy as fuck, and all want to go to Germany.

To start a discussion, please post employment rates among migrants ;-)

In Germany you receive welfare no matter of your work history. True, you need to sell your assets, like your house, but I think that's understandable. Your 65 year old retiree would receive ~410€/mo. + costs for an apartment (incl. heating etc). Again, I'm not at all saying that makes a decent living. Just that no one is really FORCED to work there.

Greece has a 25% unemployment rate. Therefore if you did not find anyone wanting to do your job, it must have been a really bad one. Or - my guess - you just didn't offered to pay a reasonable amount.

I don't know the exact employment rate among migrants, but I guess it makes no sense to discuss it here. I'm just sure that, if the unemployment rate amongst the migrants would be low, you were crying about the bad migrants taking over our jobs.

But I found workers, we employ mostly Albanians, some Greeks and one Pakistani who is here for 10 years. It is manual labor in warehouse. But I would expect more interest from "poor refugees who barely escaped the war".

Anyway this discussion is pointless.

> But I would expect more interest from "poor refugees who barely escaped the war".

Oh ok, you're definitely just repeating extreme right-wing propaganda now. Thanks for clarifying that.

"poor refugees" is left-wing propaganda. Right-wind is anti-islam, terrorists...

In half of OECD countries, including the UK, the employment rate is higher among migrant men than among native-born men:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/13/male-employment-r...

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