📋 Tender Overview
By the end of February over 6.4 billion had been paid out for short-time working assistance. This emerges from the COVID-19 short-time work reports for the year 2020 to January 2021 III-261 dB and February 2021 III-278 dB which were unanimously noted in the committee. Overall the budget - including the outstanding commitments - was around 10.77 billion at the end of February. 1247506 people were on short-time work at least once the proportion of women was 43.8. The goods production retail and accommodation and catering sectors were hardest hit during the entire period of the pandemic. The calculated lost hours at the end of February were 343484656. A total of 116567 companies booked short-time working assistance.Labor Minister Martin Kocher described short-time working as the most important crisis instrument from the labor market perspective. At the height of the crisis in April 2020 over a million people were on short-time work he explained. In a comparison of the federal states Vienna was at the top with over 1.5 billion and Upper Austria with around 1.2 billion in short-time working aids Kocher led. Phase 4 of the short-time work will run until the end of June. There are already good talks with the social partners about a continuation in phase 5. From the point of view of the labor minister this must be substantially different from the previous short-time work on the premise that there will be no more large-scale closings from the third quarter.Laurenz Pttinger VP spoke positively about the system of short-time working especially when it comes to preventing migration to other industries. For Markus Koza Greens short-time work is in addition to increasing emergency aid the central instrument for providing people with social security and preventing poverty. Gerald Loacker NEOS in turn criticized that it was too easy to outsmart the system and that there was a lack of incentives to get out of short-time work. In his opinion the positive effects decrease and the negative effects increase as the duration progresses. Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek Michael Seemayer and Josef Muchitsch from the SP spoke out in favor of more controls. Muchitsch pleaded analogous to road traffic for more radar controls for short-time work in order to prevent abuse.That there is enough control is also a concern of his department said Kocher. A series of speed traps has been set up. He was convinced that the macroeconomic benefits of short-time work predominate as long as there are large-scale lockdowns. However he hopes that this will no longer be necessary from the third quarter onwards. Then short-time work has to be designed more precisely for example linked to certain industries or a minimum working time. We are currently working on different variants he hopes for progress in the next few weeks says Kocher.
