Title: Short-term work should become ‘less attractive’

On Friday, the federal government announced that there may be opening moves in May. With this easing, there will also be a strong economic recovery, AMS board member Johannes Kopf says in an interview with PULS 24 anchor Alina Marzi. This depends on the progress made in vaccinating the population and the evolution of the Corona mutations. According to Kopf, it is evident that “with the vents comes the action naturally,” as well as the “catch-up effects”. It assumes that there will be significant growth and a decrease in the number of unemployed in the third quarter at the latest.

Working for short periods of time will become “less attractive”.

In the Social Committee, Labor Minister Martin Kocher (ÖVP) describes short-time work as the most important tool for coping with crises from a labor market perspective. The fourth stage of short-term work will continue until the end of June. There are already good discussions with the social partners about the continuation of Stage 5. From the Minister of Labor’s view this should be significantly different from previous short-term work. According to Johannes Kopf, the future of short-term work depends on how disease progresses by summer and the opening steps taken. You should also consider making short time work “less attractive” than the summer, says the AMS Board in an interview with PULS 24. But they don’t want that to end. Firms are more likely to “think about who I need in the long term, who I need and who I might need to release. Also, aiming to need it elsewhere,” Kopf explains. The goal is for “people to work again where they need to.”

The working machine should include almost the full range

In the interview, Kopf also spoke about the expanded jobs portal for AMS. In the internal job search engine All jobs In the future, external job advertisements will also be shown from company websites and job portals. So far, the AMS job search engine has only shown job offers that have been reported by companies to the Public Employment Service. AMS now wants to make the job almost entirely available in Austria through the new search function. Moreover, border regions of the German Federal Employment Agency have been integrated into the job search engine AMS, Kopf explains in an interview.

“The big advantage of looking for new jobs is that almost all jobs advertised in Austria are organized and easy to find,” says AMS Board Member Johannes Kopf. “So far we had about 40 percent of all jobs, and now about 100 percent of all vacancies in Austria appear on one platform.” The job search engine currently contains nearly 300,000 vacancies. According to Cupf, on average 40 percent of vacancies are open for only ten days. Because even in times of crisis, people would retire, take parental leave, or seek to change careers every day, Kopf explains. This would give the labor market a certain dynamism, even in light of the pandemic.