Germany's Turkish 'Guest Workers' Face Old-Age Poverty Six Decades On

On October 30, 1961, West Germany and Turkey signed an agreement allowing Turkish workers to be recruited for temporary stays. Sixty-five years later, many of those who came, the people Germany called guest workers, cannot live on what they receive in retirement.

Düsseldorf Airport is where the first of them arrived, and in mid-September it became the setting for a commemoration. Henrik Wüst, premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, honored the courage of that first generation and their part in building Germany's prosperity. By the time recruitment stopped in 1973, about 870,000 Turkish men and women had come to work. They labored in coal mines, did piecework on assembly lines and cleaned factory floors. Most settled in Düsseldorf, Cologne or Duisburg. Wüst said they had made the country more diverse, more open and stronger, and added that the goal would be reached only when name, skin color and religion no longer matter.

Integration expert Haci-Halil Uslucan told DW that Germany is still far from that point. Even now, he said, people of Turkish descent face a great deal of discrimination. Still, he considers the recruitment agreement mostly a success story: many more college graduates, professional advancement, and political careers such as that of Cem Özdemir, state premier of Baden-Württemberg. Uslucan's own life fits that pattern. His father came to Berlin and worked in the textile industry, and two years later brought his wife and two sons over. Uslucan went on to earn a doctorate in psychology and now holds a professorship in contemporary Turkish studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His recent research examines loneliness among former guest workers.

Poverty is the other shadow. By Uslucan's account, old-age poverty runs between 25 and 30 percent among migrants in Germany, against roughly 12 to 14 percent among Germans. Disability and early retirement are significantly more common among migrants, he says, because the first generation did such punishing physical work. They were also twice as likely to lose their jobs in the decade before retirement age. Lower monthly pay, gaps in employment and work in low-wage sectors all feed into small pensions.

An analysis by the German pension insurance fund (DRV) for the Mediendienst Integration, an information service for journalists, puts numbers on it. Pensioners with Turkish citizenship receive on average about €890 a month, which is €360 less than the €1,250 German pensioners receive. In June 2026, 9.3 percent of retirees with Turkish citizenship relied on top-up welfare benefits, compared with 2.7 percent of Germans, more than three times the rate.

Eric Seils, a social scientist at the Hans Böckler Foundation in Düsseldorf, points first to timing: many workers arrived in the middle of their working lives and had fewer years to pay into the pension system. But the main reasons, he said, were lower wages and shorter work histories. Recruits often went straight to factories, mines or construction sites, where hourly pay was modest, partly because they tended to have less education than Germans. Deindustrialization and the oil crisis in the early 1970s then cost many of them their jobs, and Seils noted that interrupted careers eventually show up in retirement benefits. Less-educated workers were more likely to be laid off, he said, as were Germans in the same position.

Janina Söhn of the Institute for Sociological Research (SOFI) at Göttingen University, who has studied poverty among older immigrants, notes that nearly a third of immigrants in Germany are at risk of poverty. Women already face higher risk, she said, and the figures for female migrants living alone are dire. Without family support, she said, the situation would be worse.

Extra income in retirement is also harder to come by. Federal Employment Agency figures show that 5.2 percent of retired Turkish people in Germany are employed, half the 10.8 percent rate among Germans. Many lack qualifications or were left physically unfit by earlier labor. Söhn said the generation was brought in to do the worst jobs while many Germans advanced through education and training, an opportunity the Turkish workers did not get. Those who did work every economy needs, she said, paid for it with their health.

Whether pension and integration policy will address what this generation is living with remains the open question.