On 17 May Austria’s newly appointed Chancellor, Christian Kern promised a ‘New Deal’ for the country with an ‘Agenda 2025’ for its employees and social partners. Although too soon to know all the details of the action plan that aims to modernize the economy and boost both businesses and jobs, Chancellor Christian Kern started out the week by highlighting a few concrete lines of action. In addition to an open position over measures to make working time more flexible, something employers have been constantly calling for, the Chancellor is proposing to better handle economic trends towards digitization and automation via a new tax, that Austrian’s have nicknamed the ‘machine tax’ (Maschinensteuer), which should better distribute social levies across the work environment. In another move, the Council of Ministers adopted a long expected measure that makes training mandatory until the age of 18.
The ‘New Deal’: a teaser. Continuous falls over recent years in Austria’s productivity levels together with increases in unemployment levels and not to omit the current refugee-migrant crisis have combined to lead to electoral success for the extreme-right and this ‘New Deal’ as announced by the new ‘Employer-Chancellor’ (former rail boss), which wants to free up the economy and boost employment by cutting ‘red-tape’ for setting up businesses, both reducing working time and making it more flexible, and gearing up the economy and the country’s social security system for increased digitalization and automation.
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