"Find a Friend!" urge the posters inside Croon Elektrotechniek.
Croon, which installs electrical systems in buildings, boats and offshore oil rigs, is not promoting a lonely-hearts club. It is recruiting: Any employee who brings in a new worker will receive an extra half-month of pay.
No high school diploma? Not essential. No experience? Croon offers its own classes. Only speak Polish or Portuguese? Please apply anyway.
"I could use another 200 to 250 people," said Hans Kleiwegt, Croon's managing director.
It is a plea heard up and down the Netherlands, a country whose striking economic success is bumping up against its limits because of a chronic shortage of workers.
But the unusual problems facing the Dutch also highlight one of the major challenges Europe confronts in its long push to reshape itself into a borderless economic powerhouse. Its various nations, many now subject to the exact same interest rate policies and limited in how much they can spend individually on fiscal stimulus, still must deal with different economic issues.
A few years ago, Dutch growth raced far ahead of its big neighbors like Germany. Drawn by flexible work rules, moderate wages and a highly educated work force, billions of dollars poured in from companies like Cisco Systems and Microsoft, which use the Netherlands as a European distribution center.
In the meantime, much of the rest of Europe grappled with high unemployment and sluggish growth.
So now, the Netherlands, along with several other similarly placed countries, presents a quandary for Europe's 2-and-a-half-year-old central bank, which must set a single monetary policy for fast-growing nations and struggling ones alike.
From its headquarters in Frankfurt, the European Central Bank dispenses the same medicine for eastern Germany, where the unemployment rate is over 10 percent, as it does for the Netherlands, where even in the midst of the current slowdown, joblessness is only 2 percent. Dutch inflation is the highest in Europe at 5 percent; in France it is barely over 2 percent.
Torn between signs of a near recession in Germany, the Continent's largest economy, and disturbingly high inflation in the Netherlands, Ireland and Portugal, Europe's central bankers have found it difficult to find a one-size-fits-all monetary policy. So far they have cut interest rates only slightly, to 4.5 percent.
While the Dutch had long followed Germany's example even before the introduction of the euro, if they still had official control of their own monetary policy, they might well have tried to slow their headlong growth last year to keep the economy from overheating by raising interest rates. Lacking control over rates, however, Holland is now suffering both from the global slowdown and the inflationary pressures that are the legacy of its worker shortage.
The Netherlands faces a labor crunch in almost every category. Even as its economy begins to weaken in response to the global economic slowdown, the scarcity of workers now ranks as one of the country's biggest preoccupations. Construction companies have had to turn down projects. Schools are so short of teachers that the government has slashed certification requirements. Some educators even debated the merits of a four-day school week to allow the existing pool of teachers to serve more children.
Hospitals are so desperate for nurses that several have tried, so far with little success, to import them from South Africa. In collective bargaining talks last year, hospitals agreed to raise nursing wages by a whopping 12 percent.
But language and culture remain as big barriers.
"When you move someone from New York to Illinois, it isn't so hard because at least you have the same language," remarked Hans de Boer, president of the Royal Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. "But when you want to hire someone here from Germany or France, it's entirely different. As soon as the job gets into communications, the fact that we all speak different languages is a problem."
In recent months, the Netherlands has been hit sharply by the slowdown in the US. Heavily dependent on exports, Dutch economic growth virtually stopped in the first three months of this year and remains anemic.
But so far that has not eased the worker shortage. Temporary-work agencies are trolling for construction workers in Germany, offering free housing and free transportation.
It probably won't be enough. In a recent report, the Dutch government warned that staff shortages and rising wages were eroding Dutch competitiveness.
"Labor costs will increase considerably more than among the Netherlands' European competitors," the report predicted. Citing "bottlenecks owing to staff shortages" and "deteriorating competitiveness," the report predicted that "Dutch exporters will lose market share to international competitors in 2001 and 2002."
Almost everywhere, the job shortage is apparent. At the Plaza shopping center in downtown Rotterdam in July, three stores posted signs for salespeople, and one restaurant advertised for a bartender.
"We've been looking for four months for two people skilled in custom-tailored suits," said Wymcko Tonckens, manager at The Society Shop. "We hired one person who starts in August, but we haven't hired the other."
To find workers, many companies have been willing to go to extraordinary lengths.
Nettenbouw, an electrical contracting company in Amersfoort, a city in the central part of the Netherlands, lent 40 flashy yellow motor scooters to students who signed up for its training programs.
The company scours high schools for people as young as 15 who can be trained to dig trenches and lay cable. To lure electrical engineers, it offered a trip to Paris for anybody who stayed through a two-month probation period.
"We need 60 people right now, ordinary laborers," said Helma Evers, Nettenbouw's director of human resources. "We have had to turn down requests from companies and municipal authorities."
Timberland, the American producer of hiking boots and outdoor clothing, has built up a huge warehouse and shipping center in Enschede. Like many foreign companies, Timberland was drawn to the Netherlands by its modest wage costs a decade ago, modern infrastructure and flexible work rules.
Gradually Timberland has shut warehouses scattered across Europe and consolidated operations in Enschede, an eastern city.
But about 50 percent of its workers come from other countries -- Germany, Poland and even Finland. All the top managers can speak German, and one of the Polish workers speaks Dutch and acts as interpreter for compatriots.
"We could not do it just with Dutch workers -- it would be impossible," said Harry Klijnstra, Timberland's human resources manager.
The scarcity of workers is forcing Dutch leaders to grapple with immigration issues that they have failed to resolve for decades. The Netherlands is already home to nearly 2 million immigrants, many of whom came in the 1960s as "guest workers" from Turkey or from former Dutch colonies in a quest for economic opportunity.
Now, under pressure from the government, Dutch companies have started training programs and found jobs for more than 20,000 "allochtonen," immigrants who came as guest workers or are the children of guest workers.
TNT Post Group, which owns the postal service, recently began training about 150 foreigners to become letter carriers. One was Viviane Thiese wa Thiese, a 19-year-old political refugee from Congo who has been in Rotterdam for three years and has never had a job.
Thiese wa Thiese, whose first language is French, still struggles with Dutch. Part of her training is in language. The rest is skills: how to carry the mail on a bicycle, how to sort the mail by streets.
In another bid to ease scarcity, the Dutch have changed laws to attract more stay-at-home wives into the labor market. In January, a new tax law did away with the "marriage penalty" and in effect lowered the rate on spouses' incomes.
"To sustain our level of economic growth, there are two possibilities," said Jochem Hanse, head of the government's Commission of Foreign Investment. "We either have to increase labor productivity or increase the labor participation rate."
With wages rising and labor productivity declining, the Dutch cost advantage is shrinking.
Dutch employers are pushing the government and labor unions to make major changes in the country's generous safety net. Almost 1 million people collect disability paychecks of up to 70 percent of their last salary. About 950,000 people -- almost 10 percent of the adult population -- are listed as at least partly disabled.
Company executives are pushing hard to scale back the program. "I am quite sure there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of well-skilled workers who could be helping us out," said Kleiwegt of Croon Elektrotechniek.
At Croon, executives have tried almost everything. In May, Kleiwegt introduced the "Find a Friend" campaign and the bonus to entice workers. So far, the program has attracted 70 applications, not nearly enough to fill the demand.
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