What Happens When Jobs Are Guaranteed?
After the shoe shop that Karl Blaha ran in Gramatneusiedl closed, he found work in a carpentry studio and as a German teacher through the town’s Job Guarantee program. Photographs by Thomas Albdorf for The New Yorker
In a small Austrian village, an experimental program finds—or creates—work for the unemployed.
by Nick Romeo
In 1931, three researchers from the University of Vienna travelled to Marienthal, a small town about twenty miles away, to study the effects of long-term unemployment. Two years before, Austria’s banking system had collapsed. The town’s main employer, a textile factory, had closed, laying off hundreds of workers.
The researchers found that Marienthal had been transformed by these economic ravages. “When a cat or dog disappears, the owner no longer bothers to report the loss; he knows that someone must have eaten the animal, and he does not want to find out who,” they wrote. People consumed mainly bread and coffee, the latter “stretched” with roasted figs or chicory to last longer; cabbage and potatoes vanished regularly from farmers’ fields. The town’s wrestling team, accustomed to success, could no longer field a heavyweight. Beyond material deprivations lay apathy and despair. A once regular reader of the newspaper explained that “now I just flip through it and then throw it away, even though I have more time.” After applying for a hundred and thirty jobs with no success, another man spent half his days in bed. Political meetings shrank, fewer books were checked out from the library, and domestic quarrels and alcoholism shadowed marriages. Even children felt hopeless: “I want to be a pilot, a submarine captain, an Indian chief, and a mechanic,” one twelve-year-old boy wrote in a school essay. “But I am afraid it will be very difficult to find a job.”
The trio’s study was published in 1933, as “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” (“The Unemployed of Marienthal”). The booklet, which became an early classic of sociology, showed that employment provides much more than an income. Work is a source of structure, esteem, and motivation, and its disappearance can lead to depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal turmoil. (It’s estimated that as many as one in five suicides can be linked to joblessness.) As Hitler’s power grew, the yearnings for activity, structure, and community articulated by the unemployed in the Marienthal study came to seem newly ominous. “On a large scale it is quite probable that part of the success of the early Hitler movement came about because large numbers of unemployed were taken into barracks and kept busy with paramilitary training,” one of the sociologists wrote, in a foreword to the American edition.
Marienthal still exists, although, over the course of the twentieth century, it came to be subsumed by a neighboring village called Gramatneusiedl. In the fall of 2020, the Austrian government’s public-employment agency decided to launch a job-guarantee program there—an initiative that would guarantee work to the unemployed. Anyone who has been jobless for a year or more now has the option of a guaranteed job for the duration of the program. In some cases, it’s a subsidized private-sector position; in others, a nonprofit works with participants to create a job that meets local needs. The original study wanted to learn how unemployment affected people. The current experiment, which is run by the Public Employment Service of Lower Austria, and is being studied by economists at Oxford and sociologists at the University of Vienna, asks the opposite question: What happens when anyone who wants a decent job can get one?
In Austria, “Gramatneusiedl” is sometimes used as an expression for a small town in the middle of nowhere.
Iarrived in Gramatneusiedl on a warm July morning, in 2021. My interpreter, Helma Kinzl, couldn’t believe she was really there—in Austria, “Gramatneusiedl” is sometimes used as an expression for a small town in the middle of nowhere. Looking around, I could see why. About three thousand people live in the village, which is bisected by a single quiet road, with a church, a café, and a handful of small shops and restaurants. Many shop windows were shuttered. Flat farmland stretched away in every direction.
So far, a hundred and twelve people have used the Job Guarantee, as the program is known, to find work; at least fifty more are expected to do so before 2024, when the program is scheduled to end. Participants complete an eight-week training course, then receive a job offer; they’re free to decline it without losing their unemployment benefits, but so far everyone who’s been offered a job has chosen to work. This is likely because participants discuss their skills and interests with social workers during the training period. Early on, a few proposed starting a carpentry workshop, and it now restores old furniture and builds new pieces; others have asked for jobs maintaining public parks and local green areas, and are now being paid to do so. People work between sixteen and thirty-eight hours a week, depending on their goals, medical needs, and caretaking obligations. Salaries, which typically range between eleven hundred and twenty-four hundred euros a month, are set so that everyone earns at least as much as they previously received in unemployment benefits. A year on unemployment—including payments, subsidies, and lost taxes—costs the Austrian government an average of thirty thousand euros. Each guaranteed job costs an average of €29,841.39.
The Job Guarantee is headquartered in a mansion where the owner of Marienthal’s now demolished textile factory once lived; a single smokestack looms behind the mansion. When I arrived, about a dozen people were clustered on the building’s front steps, drinking coffee and chatting before work. Inside, on the first floor, a group sat at tables covered with fabrics, bags, and sewing machines. This was a weaving workshop. A blond woman in her fifties worked on animal-themed children’s backpacks, adorned with pink-and-white elephant ears or a blue dragon’s tail.
“Kids like them,” she said. She showed off a handbag made from old pairs of bluejeans. Most of the material the workshop used had been donated or scrounged from secondhand-clothing shops; the bags were sold at a market in town.
A chair made by a participant in the jobs program. The Job Guarantee is headquartered in a mansion where the . owner of a textile factory once lived.
The carpentry studio was situated in a high-ceilinged warehouse about a hundred yards from the mansion. The carpenters, men and women ranging from their twenties to their fifties, wore protective goggles, overalls, and work shirts; they were preparing to sand and refinish dozens of collapsible wooden benches, which had just been dropped off by the local fire brigade. (It rents them out for parties, baptisms, and other events.) Orders like this generate money for the program: about five per cent of its €7.4 million budget comes from these community sales. Much of the furniture that the group restores is donated. Ancient, battered storage chests, cupboards, and headboards, as well as a collapsed early-twentieth-century hay wagon, littered the space. The restored pieces would be displayed for sale in town, in the window of a shoe-repair shop that had recently closed.