Unemployment: Different Countries - Same problem

The key problem both economies, the German and the US, are struggling is unemployment. However, these two countries have completely different ways of dealing with this phenomenon “unemployment” and therefore it is essential to look at both countries separately. Michael Moore’s movie will represent the American side and the article “Odd Couple” issued in the Economist will serve as the German counter-example.
The movie “Roger&Me” by Michael Moore illustrates the problem of unemployment by means of showing the peoples’ misery and final demise. This gives unemployment a personal face, namely the face of the laid off autoworkers with no perspective for their future. The article “Odd Couple”, on the other hand, tackles the same problem in a sophisticated and scientific way, totally avoiding appealing to the readers’ emotions. In fact, they talk about possible tools and measures to approach the situation in order to eventually get the soaring unemployment rates under control. Since the German employment system is different to the US system it is not as simple to compare the situation portrayed in the movie with Germany’s unemployment problem. But the key similarity is the outsourcing or closure of prosperous domestic corporation and plants to countries with low wages and labor costs leaving their employees in despair. Both countries practice this and will probably continue to until our governments find ways to keep domestic corporations in their home country. The difference among both is that Germans have a so-called safety net – the government – to fall back on that will provide them with reliable unemployment benefits, for instance a guarantee of at least 1 ½ year of unemployment payments. The US workers, particularly the autoworkers from Flint, could not rely on this kind of government assistance as there is not such safety net, like the one in Germany.
The movie and the article, as different as they might seem, provide the reader/viewer with the general concept of the phenomenon “unemployment” and the consequences this has on ordinary people who are trying to make ends meet.