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Nuremberg headquarters of the Federal Employment Agency
Photo: Daniel Karmann / DPA
The costs of short-time work are driving the deficit of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) to ever new heights.
In the meantime, the BA assumes that it will need around 17 billion euros in federal funding in 2021 to compensate for the expected minus.
According to SPIEGEL information, this emerges from BA figures for the Bundestag's budget committee. Originally, the authority had expected a grant of 3.3 billion euros in its budget. She had estimated the total expenditure for short-time working at 6.1 billion euros. However, this sum was already reached in March. BA boss Detlef Scheele and his employees are now expecting total costs of 20 billion euros this year. The number could well increase.
The agency has been spending an average of 500 million euros on short-time work every week since January.
The basis for the current forecast of the deficit is the joint assumption of the major economic research institutes, which assume 1.6 million short-time workers per year.
The last reliable figure is from February.
At that time, almost 3.3 million people were on short-time work, that is one in ten employees.
The Ifo Institute estimates the number of short-time workers in April at 2.7 million.
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