- Cost Comparison
- First 90 Days
A bigger paycheck was never why those jobs stayed away.
A subsidy that removes the wage leaves whatever was actually in the way.
A remote seat fails because nobody in the building knows how to run a person they cannot walk past, and no discount fixes that. Greece is about to test it anyway. The state will pay 90% of the salary and the social security contributions for one year when a business hires a registered unemployed person from a mountainous or hard-to-reach area to work remotely.
Outsource Accelerator reported the plan after Labor and Social Security Minister Niki Kerameos announced it, and she did not say how many jobs it would fund or when it would start. A second measure expands a wage subsidy for unemployed women, covering up to 70% and adding 5,000 positions. The money lands on the cheapest input in a remote hire.
What Athens is buying
The stated aim is to give employers a reason to recruit where there are few jobs, and to let people stay in the towns they are from. A real goal, and a serious instrument for it. The diagnosis underneath is what interests me. It assumes an employer skips the village because the hire costs too much.
I do not think that is what stops anybody. A business does not decline to hire far away because of the wage. It declines because nobody in the building knows how to run a person they cannot walk past.
Where the subsidy stops
Ninety percent off a year of payroll is not a rounding note. Any owner working on thin margins should take it, and one who hesitates is not being prudent. A subsidy is checkable. Management overhead is not, and a number you can verify will always beat one you have to estimate. But the subsidy pays the line nobody was stuck on.
It does not pay for writing down what a correct output looks like. It does not pay for the named person who answers questions inside a stated window, or for the hours somebody spends reading work from a desk they will never visit. None of that is a property of the person being hired. This story puts a price on one practice: setting two salaries side by side, taking the lower one, and treating the hire as decided.
The year after
The clock is the part worth watching. For twelve months, the state carries the burden of proof on these hires. Then it hands it back, at full price, to a manager who has never had to justify the arrangement on its own output. That is not a hiring program. That is a trial period somebody else paid for.
US firms do not get a subsidy like this, and that is fine, because the useful thing here is not the money. Greece is about to run an experiment firms argue about internally. Take the wage out of the decision almost entirely and see which employers still cannot make a remote seat work. The renewals in month thirteen will say more about remote hiring than any survey will.
Read the second year.
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