Coal industry job losses in eastern German mining region already compensated for – state minister
ntv / Clean Energy Wire
The industrial jobs that will be lost due to the end of coal-fired power production in Germany’s eastern mining region Lusatia have already been replaced by new jobs in production, the economy minister of the state of Brandenburg, Jörg Steinbach, said in an interview with news website ntv. “If we talk about the prospective job losses in coal mining, these industrial jobs have already been compensated for,” the minister from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) said.
According to Steinbach, about 20,000 new industry jobs have been created in the past five years in Brandenburg, of which 6,000 are in the coal region Lusatia. The launch of U.S. carmaker Tesla’s first European factory in Grünheide alone had created 12,000 new jobs, the minister added. “More requests for new industrial sites have followed on Tesla,” which had brought billions of euros in investments. Lignite industry association DEBRIV said that about 8,000 people were directly employed in Lusatia’s coal sector at the end of 2023, down from around 9,000 in 2016, and 80,000 before German reunification in 1990. Germany plans to phase-out coal power no later than 2038. Defying the national trend of minimum growth, Brandenburg’s economy had grown fast in 2023, boasting the highest rate of all German states, the state’s statistical office said earlier this year.
The state that surrounds Germany’s capital Berlin will elect a new government on 22 September. As in the previous votes in eastern German Thuringia and Saxony, far-right and nationalist-left populist parties that reject the government’s energy transition policies and call for fully resuming energy trading with Russia are projected to make significant gains. Brandenburg, which has been governed by SPD state premier Dietmar Woidke since 2013, has close ties to the dynamic economy of neighbouring city state Berlin, but also includes many rural and remote regions where high-earning jobs are rare, for example in Lusatia. The far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) leads with 27 percent, followed by the SPD with 23 percent, according to a recent poll by public broadcaster RBB.
