By A. Dähling and H. Wenzel

Schwaz, Landeck – Significantly less party traffic than usual at this time prevails in the rooms of many Chamber of Labor offices.

“The number of inquiries we received has halved. I suspect that is because fewer people are employed and the rest are happy to keep their job, ”says Andreas Herzog, head of the Schwaz working group. Smaller differences in employment would therefore be more likely to be swallowed. But the many lockdowns that have hit the tourism industry in particular also have an impact on the work of the Chamber of Labor. Questions about final accounts and new contracts in hotels and restaurants, which are otherwise a long-running hit in the Schwazer AK, are now almost completely eliminated due to the fact that the businesses are closed. But the questions about short-time work, with which the AK consultants were often busy last spring, also decreased rapidly. “Up until six months ago there were still a lot of questions about accounting for short-time work. In the last three months, we have therefore roughly estimated ten employees, ”says Herzog. The fact that the federal government’s instructions for tax consultants are countless pages shows how difficult it is to check whether the accounts are correct. “People now have other worries,” Herzog speculates as the reason for the decline in inquiries.

In the eight-person team at the Landeck AK district office, employees who normally have tourism jobs also rarely knock at the moment. Nevertheless, there could be no question of “underemployment”. Among the 22,000 employees (currently 4000 of them are unemployed) there are labor and social law violations “churning out”, as AK district office manager Peter Comina emphasized. “Actually, people come to us with all the problems we can offer support for.” That applies to consumer issues as well as the new employee tax assessment for 2020.

“At the moment, because of the corona-related unemployment, there are more and more inquiries about financial help from the support fund of the AK and the state,” noted Comina.