Denouncement against the Unemployed by the Economic Chamber: A Case for the Data Protection Agency!

‘Active Unemployed Austria’ probably prove an illegal collection of data about job applicants by the Economic Chamber

(Vienna/Graz, 2^nd August 2016) Year after year provincial departments of the economic chamber stir up public opinion against a part of the jobseekers to whom they generally impute reluctance to work and who are to be blamed for the fact that companies don’t find employees in spite of the all-time high unemployment. In a letter to enterprises the Economic Chamber of the Tyrol has called for identifying unemployed people without further ado who “only want to get the ‘well-known’ stamp” or “who more or less clearly express” that they are not interested in a job. Besides “a lack of willingness to work”, “unrealistic job expectations” and “wrong expectations” of the jobseekers are to be blamed for the problems of the employers when looking for employees. The economic chamber promises to report suspicious applicants “immediately” to the PES in order to prevent “social abuse” this way.

The economic chamber, however, is a public corporation regulated by law which is only allowed to process data which correspond to the purposes concretely defined in the Economic Chamber Act. The processing of data of the employees and the surveillance of jobseekers is not provided for by law anyway. Moreover, the employers and finance officers make themselves liable to prosecution, if they wrongly call jobseekers “unwilling to work” with regard to the PES as an administrative body (§ 289 Criminal Code – False testimony in front of an administrative authority).

In case of contradictory statements about job applications the PES is namely obliged to have a formal witness examination even on the part of the employer and not only the often wrongly accused jobseekers! (For example, Administrative Court 2010/08/0034 and many more) However, the economic chamber does not enlighten the employers about that and thus leads the employers to possibly commit a breach of law! Now even the Economic Chamber of Upper Austria, which has already attracted attention several times by stirring up public opinion against unemployed people who are ostensibly unwilling to work, has joined this highly questionable denouncement action.

The economic chamber as a persistent offender is already notorious in office!

The Economic Chamber in the Tyrol is already notoriously known to the data protection agency for probably illegal ascertainments of data. It wasn’t until the 9^th May this year that the data protection agency found a data collection illegal on account of a missing legal basis. The data collection has been made for years by employees of the economic chamber in the Tyrol, who supervised employees at building-sites for fighting illicit work and the data protection agency recommended that the data be deleted. That is why it can be proven that the economic chamber knows that its data collection frenzy is greatly doubtful for legal reasons.

The association ‘Aktive Arbeitslose Austria’ is therefore going to involve the data protection agency and will examine criminal facts of the case on account of the probably illegal data collection. The search for employment is part of the protected privacy according to the Administrative Court (ref. no. 2013/08/0070 legal rule 1) as defined by the European Human Rights Convention which is in the constitutional law and for which reasons even the PES is only to a limited extent allowed to check the search for employment, particularly the unsolicited applications.

The Economic Chamber distracts from its own incompetence

In view of more than 500,000 missing workplaces of gainful employment and the downright strict and almost harassing threat of benefit sanctions which imperil the livelihood and which has also been regarded as a potential restriction of the human right of freely chosen paid work by the UNO, it is a mockery to put the blame for the incompetence of several employers to find people for their jobs on the victims of the employment crisis.

If there are possibly 10,000 to 20,000 vacancies out of 60,000 to 70,000 that can hardly be filled in view of approximately 4.1 million persons in gainful employment, then this is not a pivotal economic problem and under no circumstances is it a reason to call upon all employers to potentially suspect applicants of “unwillingness to work” and to report ostensibly suspects to the economic chamber. The majority of about 14,000 benefit sanctions on account of putative “foiling” every year are by the way not imposed because of refused job offers, but rather because of the rejection of compulsory measures of the PES, which are often experienced as futile and unlawful!

The campaigns of officials, divorced from reality, of the economic chamber, take place every year and therefore probably rather serve to sidetrack from their own inability to usefully support employers in their search for suitable staff, or rather, to induce employers to have more realistic expectations of the staff and to care for more acceptable working conditions. The repressive sanction regime of the PES and the denunciation of jobseekers appears to us to be an attack on the rights of all employees because in this way the fear of dependence on the PES is stirred up and employees are forced to put up with increasingly worse working conditions. The silence of the Workers’ and Employees’ Professional Association and of the Austrian Federation of Unions on these permanent attacks on human beings who depend on paid labour therefore remains incomprehensible to us.

• Interview with Martin Mair, chairman of ‘Aktive Arbeitslose Austria’ in the ZiB 2 (1^st August 2016)