> Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it.

Yes, this is true. About 39% of the currently employed have so called atypical jobs [1] - some of which are actually subsidized by the state, because income is so low.

Germany is an austerity poster child - I wonder what will happen, if the export boom is over. Things might become much worse, once the debt-financed foreign purchases dry up for some reason.

[1] https://www.boeckler.de/108863_108907.htm (German only).

Oh, unions are fighting for workers, just not very successful. They can lower the impact of market forces, but they cannot negate them. Who they are notoriously not fighting for is temp workers and future temp workers who have it much worse than barely matching inflation. Darkly logical, temps are not members.

Where are you seeing that the German economy is booming? It hasn't net expanded in ten years.

GDP 2007: $3.44 trillion vs 2016: $3.46 trillion

It has been averaging around 1.5% GDP growth since 2011. That is not booming. Germany may finally climb above the pre great recession era GDP numbers in 2017. Germany is having the problems that it is, precisely due to the lack of meaningful economic growth. There's no scenario where you're going to see almost any wage growth if GDP is mired in 0.5% to 1.5% type expansion; to make matters worse, the next recession will easily swat the recent modest gains right back down (which is one of the many reasons faster growth is a must, inevitably a recession will occur).

>union-reps are in bed with the company...

I imagine more of the problem is German factories have to compete with those in lower wage EU countries like Poland and so have limited room to pay more.