Job Promotion and Turnover among Spanish Workers in the FRG, 1960–75

 In 1960, there were around 16,000 Spanish nationals working in the FRG, but by 1965 this figure had risen to over 180,000. Their number peaked in 1971, with 186,000 workers. In the early 1960s, Spanish immigrants initially accounted for 11% of the overall number of foreign workers in the West German labour market, and in 1964 and 1965 they recorded their maximum contribution of 15%. From then on, these figures began to drop off, falling to 6% in 1975, well behind Turkey (26.6%), Yugoslavia (20.4%), and Italy (14.3%), and even surpassed by Greece (9.6%) (Bauer& Zimmermann, 1996). My research goal is to study two topics that have featured among the concerns of social scientists, companies and governments (Dohse, 1981; Bade, 1983; Herbert, 2001). The first topic involves addressing the turnover of immigrant Spanish workers in the FRG. The second step will be to examine job promotion within companies. The aim will be to provide quantitative evidence of both these phenomena and analyze their causality and interrelationship with other aspects of the migratory project of Spanish workers.