Enlarge image
Employment agency: budget with billions of holes
Photo: Jan Huebner / imago images
When it comes to coping with the corona crisis economically, the short-time working allowance is a model for success: employees work less or not at all, and the employment agency compensates for part of the loss of earnings.
This relieves the company and is intended to prevent layoffs, but it goes into the money.
A month ago the regular budget of the Federal Employment Agency was used up, and additional billions from the federal government should not be enough.
Now the federal agency needs a new financial injection from the federal government in order to cope with the increasing expenditure on short-time work benefits. The original budget was around six billion euros for 2021 - at that time the Federal Agency had expected an average of 700,000 short-time workers in 2021. In February the amount had already been doubled to 12.5 billion, but that too will not be enough.
Now another 7.4 billion euros are needed, as the Green member of the Bundestag Ekin Deligöz announced. A spokesman for the federal agency confirmed the information. The Federal Agency is therefore dependent on even more tax money, since the premium income is far from being sufficient and the reserves are either used up or not available in liquid form. The administrative board of the federal agency could decide on the financial application to the government in May.
According to Deligöz, the increased demand is not only due to the sheer number of short-time workers, which economic institutes estimate at around 1.6 million a year on average.
People also have a higher proportion of short-time work, are longer on short-time work and thus receive more money than those who are only affected for a few weeks.
By mid-April, nine billion euros had already been spent on short-time work and the associated social contributions, Deligöz said.
The Federal Agency points out that short-time working is about three times cheaper than financing unemployment, despite the high expenditure for the contributor.
mic / dpa
