244 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
ment of the workforce (until 1951, Employment Offi ces [Arbeitsämter]);
1951 to 1961, Departments of Labor (Abteilungen für Arbeit); 1961 to
1973, Offi ces for Work and Vocational Counseling (Ämter für Arbeit und
Berufsberatung). The planning bureaucracy could mandate the transfer
of employees from one plant to another, and even impose sanctions if
these directives were not followed. Nonetheless, the “stockpiling” of ex-
tra workers was not uncommon. Ultimately, however, the full employ-
ment policy of the GDR was only a success on paper. Countless people
were considered to be employed, although they were not really needed
in the workfl ow or operating processes. This generally low level of labor
productivity compared to Western industrial states can therefore be seen
as an expression of an invisible form of mass unemployment. Moreover,
the disproportionately infl ated administrative and security apparatus of
the SED state created superfl uous jobs as well.
The FRG also experienced what was a de facto phase of full employ-
ment following the “Korea boom,” which fostered rationalization of
workforce organization and production technology, especially in the in-
dustrial sector. It also accounts for the state-sponsored stream of foreign
“guestworkers” that fl ocked to West Germany well into the 1970s. Such
measures were also largely designed to rein in the growing number of
mothers who were becoming wage-earners. Notwithstanding, the per-
centage of women within the employment population rose from 37.1 per-
cent in 1960 to 44.4 percent in 2005 (only in the “West”); there were clear
jumps in these fi gures in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as after the turn of
the twenty-fi rst century, which were actually periods in which unemploy-
ment was on the upswing.^6 Consequently, the rising number of working
women did not stem from the need for additional labor, but rather from
the expansion of the educational system and a cultural transformation
in women’s self-images that was strengthening their desire to become
economically independent.
Although unemployment reached an all-time statistical low in 1970,
with approximately a hundred thousand (frictional) unemployed, it in-
creased steadily from that point on; by 1989, it had climbed to around 2.3
million. According to the Federal Statistical Offi ce (Statistisches Bundes-
amt), unemployment jumped to about fi ve million (2005) following reuni-
fi cation before bouncing back nominally to about three million (see table
5.1). Naturally, these fi gures do not provide any qualitative information
about the jobs that were counted statistically as “employment.” More-
over, the rapidly growing structural unemployment in the “old Federal
Republic” that had set in around the mid-1970s points to fundamental
processes of transformation that engulfed the highly industrial societies
of the West, aff ecting all sectors of the West German economy.