What I was taught in macroeconomics in this topic (excuse me if I get something wrong, it’s been a few years)
In general it’s very expected unemployment to „generally“ be higher in Germany.
Because it’s harder to fire people here, people also get hired somewhat slower. However in the flip side it’s also expected that during harsh economic times people will be fired less because of how „hard“ it is to hire people.
So it’s a trade-off.
Where you get 60%-85% of your salary (after tax) without work or with way less ours, if the employer has no work/less work (like covid period). It’s payed mostly by the state. Up to 12 month. Regulations are strict.
Prevents layoffs and helps starting the upturn of production like automobile industry, where it takes months or half a year to start ramping up production.
If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security.
There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out).
The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that.
The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are.
Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.
