at least not for everybody. “Even though
there was no single big break that deregu-
lated the labor market, working condi-
tions in Austria have changed a lot,”
Flecker says. Work has become more
flexible, yet the reduction of average
hours worked has stalled since the 1980s.
Part of this is due to a significant rise in
Scheinselbständigkeit, feigned free-
lancing, i.e. working as a self-employed
contractor for a single employer but
without the benefits of true employment.
At the same time, unemployment has
gone up: It reached an post 1950s high of
6.3% in August 2016, went down to
5.4% in July 2017, according to Eurostat
(and still remarkably low by inter-
national comparison).
But benefits are generous and reliable.
In Austria, the unemployed get at least
55% of their former salary in benefits,
helping to ease existential fears, although
most still feel a stigma from being without
a job. “It is only the older generation that is
frequently or long-term unemployed,”
says Flecker. “As much of society is still not
affected, unemployment is not considered
as big of a scandal as it actually is.”
But starting a career can also be a
challenge: For a young journalist, it is not
uncommon to do a several internships –
sometimes as many as five or six – in vari-
ous media companies before finding full-
time employment, part of the so-called
Generation Praktikum (GenerationInternship). Many criticize a system that
requires a growing proportion of young
people to start their working life with an
internship, often a disguise for regular
work that rarely guarantees a path
toward regular employment. In the U.S.,
in contrast, an internship is considered
“free training” that gives young people
the chance to gain all-important work
experience. So while Austrians consider
internships exploitation, an American
tends to ask: Why should an employer
hire somebody they still have to train?THE NOT-SO-PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC
These differences are illustrated well by
history: In 1950, Americans struggled to
implement the Marshall Plan in Austria.
“It involved the transfer of attitudes,
habits and values as well as resources,
indeed a whole way of life that Marshall
planners associated with progress in the
marketplace of politics and social rela-
tionships as much as they did with
industry and agriculture,” says Michael J.
Hogan, history professor at the University
of Illinois.
The program wanted to improve
factory-level productivity, labor manage-ment relations, free trade unions and
introduce modern business practices.
The Economic Cooperation Administra-
tion, the U.S. government agency that
administered the European Recovery
Program, dubbed Marshall Plan after its
main proponent, distributed around
$300 million and attempted to steer the
Austrian social partnership toward goals
of productivity and growth instead of redis-
tribution and consumption.
But their efforts were blocked by the
Austrian practice of making decisions
behind closed doors, insisting on what
they saw as the right balance in favor of
protected industries committed to social
goals. The Americans struggled to change
this, to dismantle the cartels and remove
legal barriers to competition. But ulti-
mately they were instead responsible for
the creation of the vast monopolistic pub-
lic sector, which became the basis for
modern Austrian social democracy.
In other words, the Austrians refused
to accept the American love of competi-
tion and productivity over the public
welfare – an ethos we can only thank our
lucky stars they were stubborn enough to
hold at bay.BUSINESS
PHOTOS: PREVIOUS PAGE: CHRISTOPHER BURNS / UNSPLASH; THIS PAGE: CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: RACHAEL GORJESTANI; JON TYSON; RAWPIXEL.COM / UNSPLASH.New York City's creative sector employs about
300,000 people, or every 13th working New Yorker.
The number of jobs in the field jumped by 13% since
2013 and growth continues to outpace other sectors.