The federal government wants to extend the special corona rules for short-time work by three more months until the end of 2021 on Wednesday. She expects the Federal Employment Agency (BA) to spend around 1.2 billion euros, according to Reuters on Monday. In addition, the cut-off date of September 30th will be canceled. The employers will then be reimbursed for the full amount of social security contributions even if short-time work is only started after this date. The same applies to the lowered threshold that only ten percent of employees have to be affected by the loss of work so that a company can register short-time work.

The renewed extension is justified with the safeguarding of jobs.

It is difficult to foresee how the corona pandemic will develop in the autumn in view of the highly contagious Delta variant.

The extension should give companies and employees planning security.

The expansion of short-time work prevented an even greater increase in unemployment in the corona pandemic.

This year alone, the Federal Agency had spent around 18 billion euros on short-time work by the end of last week, as a BA spokesman announced on request.

Of this, around 10.8 billion euros were used for short-time working benefits and around 7.2 billion euros for reimbursement of social security contributions.

The BA is currently spending around 300 million euros a week on short-time work.