Germany records 4% decline in rubber and plastics manufacturing jobs

Wiesbaden, Germany – The number of people working in Germany’s rubber and plastics goods manufacturing sector fell by 4.4% year-on-year, as of the end of December 2020, official figures show.

The data, reported 16 Feb by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), show that the polymer manufacturing industry fared significant worse than the country's manufacturing sector overall.

According to Destatis, 5.5 million people were working “in local units of manufacturing with 50 or more persons employed in Germany, at the end of last year. 

This, it said, represented a decline of about 154,000 persons or 2.7% below the manufacturing-sector employment level recorded for December 2019.

The number of hours worked in December 2020 decreased 0.5% from a year earlier, reaching 592 million, while earnings in the manufacturing sector totalled €24.0 billion, 0.6% less than in December 2019.

Destatis indicated that the declines were linked to the impact of the pandemic, linking the manufacturing data to other indicators of the economic consequences of the coronavirus crisis.