Despite good results – long-term unemployed: Kocher against job guarantee

The AMS model project, which runs until 2024, reduced long-term unemployment by 60 percent. Whether it will continue is open despite the positive interim balance.

Kocher sees a nationwide rollout of the state’s job guarantee as crucial. “There are good reasons why such projects do not exist at the federal level, because scalability is not so easy. In a big city like Vienna, where most of the long-term unemployed are, it’s much more difficult,” Kocher told the ORF business magazine “ECO”.

Idea: Everyone gets a job
The idea behind the job guarantee is simple: everyone who wants to work is guaranteed a job at the expense of the state. Here the state becomes active on its own initiative and finds or creates publicly funded jobs for the unemployed, especially for those who have few opportunities in the regular labor market. Two thirds of the pilot project participants found work, half of them in the private sector.

quality of life increases
The new head of the SPÖ Lower Austria and designated county councilor Sven Hergovich had initiated the pilot project in his former position as AMS state manager. Scientists from the University of Oxford have supported the project, which is intended for up to 150 people, from the start and have found that in addition to reducing unemployment in the city, the quality of life of the people involved has improved. significantly improved.

The pilot project in Gramatneusiedl has a total budget of 7.4 million euros. The costs for the state therefore amount to approximately 29,841 euros per person and per year. According to estimates by the AMS, a year of unemployment also costs the state an average of 30,000 euros per year. In Austria, the number of long-term unemployed has almost doubled over the past ten years. In 2012, almost 47,000 people were still unemployed, in 2022 there were about 89,000.