Award-winning project

How the SPÖ now wants to abolish unemployment

Günther Sidl, SPÖ-NÖ top candidate for the EU elections, SPÖ leader Andreas Babler, regional party leader Sven Hergovich and EU Commissioner Nicolas Schmit (from left) discussed the pilot project on site.(Bild: Imre Antal)

A workplace project by Lower Austria's SPÖ leader Sven Hergovich has won international prizes. Federal party leader Andreas Babler therefore wants the model to be adopted nationwide after the elections. The "Krone" took a closer look at what the project is all about and what the costs would be throughout Austria.

Lower Austria's SPÖ leader Sven Hergovich could hardly have chosen a more prestigious location for his prestige project. In his previous role as head of the AMS in Austria's largest federal state, he initiated the world's first job guarantee model - in Marienthal near Vienna, of all places, where a well-known study on the effects of long-term unemployment was carried out in the 1930s. The aim was to get all long-term unemployed people in the Lower Austrian municipality of Gramatneusiedl back into work. Hergovich finally launched the three-year project in October 2020 with scientific support from the universities of Oxford and Vienna.

All people from Gramatneusiedl who had been registered as unemployed with the AMS Schwechat for one year or who had reached a registration period of one year in the three years since the start of the project took part in the project.

International prizes won
In the end, the results obviously spoke for themselves. Hergovich already reaped the political laurels for this as head of the Lower Austrian SPÖ. Last year, he was invited to an award ceremony for the project in Oxford. The SPÖ state leader also won the "Innovation in Politics Award". Reason enough for SPÖ federal party leader Andreas Babler to include the model in his election manifesto. The red party leader wants the Hergovich model to set a precedent throughout Austria after the election. According to SPÖ federal party leader Andreas Babler, it is better "to invest in employment than to finance unemployment".

But: in Lower Austria, the SPÖ's demand for a nationwide roll-out, among other things, caused coalition talks to collapse and was simply too expensive for the ÖVP. The details: