(Bloomberg) -- Germany needs more foreign workers and more efficient policies to integrate them into the labor market if the country is to keep its social security systems from collapsing in the future, auto supplier Continental AG said on Wednesday.

“The impact of demographic change, decarbonization and digitalization is huge,” Ariane Reinhart, the executive responsible for human relations and sustainability, said in a statement. “The imbalance on the labor market is not only endangering the general standard of living in Germany. Our social systems are also threatening to collapse.”

Continental, known globally for its namesake car tires, is in need of 2,500 qualified staff in Germany alone this year, particularly in the areas of information technology and logistics. The country needs to loosen red tape and develop a concept for the controlled immigration of foreign workers as well as reskill jobseekers in Germany more quickly than in the past, Reinhart said.

An aging population and a decline in the number of younger people entering the labor market means Germany will have five million fewer workers by the end of the decade, Holger Schaefer, senior economist with the IW economic institute in Cologne estimated in January. The workforce is set to shrink by more than 300,000 people this year alone, unless immigration can plug the gap, he predicted.

Continental isn’t the only German company crying out for foreign staff. Staff shortages in the airline industry have sparked airport chaos across the country just as the summer vacation period goes full throttle, forcing the government to prepare a legal framework to speed up hiring of security workers from abroad, many of them from Turkey.

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