The 11 new employment programs and the 86,000 new jobs

“During the two years of New Democracy’s (ND) governance and amidst the pandemic, 50,000 new jobs were created, while in the previous 4 years 42,000 jobs were created”, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during a meeting at the central OAED (Manpower Employment Authority) headquarters on Wednesday.

The meeting was held for the presentation of the programs of the organization.

The prime minister clarified that OAED’s programs are only one aspect of the overall policy of the labor ministry. According to OAED data, an increase of 17.9 pct in job creation was achieved within a year and a half compared with the period 2016-2019, despite the effects of the pandemic on the labor market.

The goal of the programs, as Mitsotakis said, “is extremely ambitious: to create 86,000 new job positions in 2022, with resources that will come from the Recovery Fund and from the NSRF”.

The programs for the period 2020-21 moved in three directions: stimulating employment, gaining work experience and supporting entrepreneurship. They were characterized by a high degree of absorption, in contrast to previous years, when it was found that actions with high budgets had an absorption of even 3% to 8%.

In practice, this means that thanks to active employment policies, the development of new programs and the modification of old ones that were relatively inefficient, an increase of 17.9% was achieved within a year and a half compared to the entire four years 2016-2019, despite the effects of the pandemic on the labor market.

On an annual basis, in the midst of the pandemic, OAED succeeds in creating more than 33,400 positions per year, a number more than three times higher than the 10,627 positions that were created on average each year in the previous four years.