German industry jobs to peak

Despite sluggish global economic growth and a recession in the eurozone, the German manufacturing industry added another 27,000 jobs to payrolls in July, compared with the previous month, according to data released by the German Statistic Office, Destatis, on Monday.

Year-on-year, industrial job creation came in at 129,000 jobs, Destatis said, which drove employment in this sector of the German economy to 5.23 million people.

"This constitutes the highest figures since 2008," the German statisticians said in a statement.

Germany's medium-sized industry – widely regarded as the backbone of the country's economy – contributed an above-average 4.5 percent more jobs to the annual total by July.

The biggest booming sectors of industry were machine tools, which employed 4.5 percent more people in the past 12 months, ending in July. The country's automobile industry followed with an increase of 3.4 percent, an addition of 748,000 employees to its payroll.

Industrial wages rose 5.1 percent year-on, while the number of hours worked in industry climbed 4.8 percent, Destatis said.

However, Destatis noted that job creation in industry had "steadily lost its dynamic" since December 2011, when the pace of growth began to slow from an annual 3.6 percent in 2011 to 2.5 percent over the course of this year.

uhe/kms (Reuters, dpa)