ATHENS – Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will be speaking in Parliament on Wednesday afternoon at 17:00, during the plenary debate on the labour and social affairs ministry bill on reorganising the state employment service “Jobs Again”.

Parliament’s Scientific Council on Penalties for Job Seekers in “Jobs Again” Bill

Parliament’s Scientific Council has issued its report on the system of penalties for job seekers that fail to meet a series of obligations outlined in the “Jobs Again” bill that is being debated in the Hellenic Parliament on Wednesday and is a point of controversy between the government and the opposition parties.

The bill envisages that job seekers who fail to meet a series of obligations under the bill, such as having their benefits stopped and being removed from the Public Employment Service (renamed OAED) register for two years if they refuse three offered jobs, or having their benefits stopped and being removed from the unemployment register for six months if they refuse continued job training or don’t complete a Digital Personal Action Plan, among others.

The Scientific Council has observed that the “criteria for imposing the above penalties are given as objective, without allowing the possibility of taking possible subjective conditions (for example, family reasons) into account, while there is no escalation of the threatened penalties in correlation with the individual conditions in each case so that, for example, a person refusing to participate in a continued professional training action faces the same penalty as someone who participates but fails to get certified.”