November 12, 2017
A front page Washington Post article on the continued use of coal in Germany, in spite of its impact on global warming, told readers that one of the reasons it is difficult to cut back on coal is the industry employs about 20,000 people. Since most readers are unlikely to have a clear idea of the size of Germany’s labor force, it would have been helpful to point out that this comes to less than 0.05 percent of its workforce of 43.0 million.
This doesn’t mean that job loss for these workers would not still be traumatic, although Germany does provide much better unemployment benefits than the United States. It is important for readers to have some sense of how important employment in the sector is to the nation as a whole, which this piece did not give.
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