The corona numbers are increasing. The City of Vienna has therefore extended its “winter package” for people without an apartment until August: around 800 beds will remain open for the time being. The quarter in the Favoritener Gudrunstraße should be closed. There is protest against this.
Vienna leaves the emergency sleeping places open for people without a home for the pandemic. “We want to have the appropriate capacities available in the months ahead so that we can continue to provide good support to people affected by homelessness in the pandemic,” says Anita Bauer, Managing Director of the Vienna Social Fund (FSW). Actually, these accommodation options, intended exclusively for the cold season, should have been closed from the end of April to October.
So far so good. But only one day after this announcement it came to one Protest in the Vienna district of Favoriten. The employees of an emergency quarter in Gudrunstraße carried out a three-hour warning strike and a public works meeting with around 200 people who expressed their solidarity.
The reason: of all things, the “Gudi”, the only emergency accommodation for men in Vienna’s most populous district, is excluded from the extension of the winter quarter. At the end of April, the facility in Gudrunstraße will be mothballed. When asked “at the present time”, the FSW could not answer whether it will reopen next winter. The already precariously employed workers face an uncertain future. Around 70 regular and five emergency beds are disappearing. What’s going on at the Viennese emergency quarters?
Corona-Cluster im Notquartier
Similar to the care sector, there is also increasing pressure among social workers. There are complaints about low wages, a lack of prospects, insecure working conditions and a job that often does not go beyond a misery administration. The pandemic has exacerbated many of these problems. The employees of the emergency quarter in Gudrunstraße have therefore repeatedly approached the public in recent months, supported by groups such as the “Summer Package Initiative” or “Social but not stupid”.
At the end of January, the employees of the emergency quarter in Gudrunstraße reported one Corona cluster in your premises. 25 out of 70 overnight guests and 5 employees are affected. This shows that mass quarters would represent a “massive health hazard” in Corona times. “Some overnight people therefore prefer to sleep on the street,” said the staff at the Gudrunstraße emergency quarter in an article.
In response to inquiries in this context, the Vienna Social Fund refers to “own quarantine quarters for people without a fixed place of residence” in order to be able to guarantee a “necessary quarantine of persons or contact persons who tested positive”. The employees of Gudrunstraße have little to gain from this. The quarantine quarters are often overcrowded, and it was hardly possible to isolate infected people.
Closing due to protest? “No context”
In the emergency quarters Gudrunstraße there was only one food distribution point, where long queues formed. Sanitary facilities were also scarce. Keep your distance in the emergency quarters? Impossible. The already scarce workforce was thinned out more and more due to burnout and corona sick leave.
As early as the end of January, the workforce concluded: “We see once again that we are putting our health at risk for starvation wages, for work that is little more than administration of misery. We have pointed out the danger of mass quarters often enough. We were ignored. That is why we will go new ways of protest. ”
The workforce believes that the April closure will punish them for these protests. Both the FSW and the Arbeiteramariterbund deny this. “We appreciate these colleagues very much,” says Stefanie Kurzweil for the Arbeiteramariterbund. There are no black lists, the workforce was told that too.
The FSW also asserts that there is no connection between the demands of the workforce in January and the closure now. The total capacities from the winter would simply not be needed and would therefore be slightly reduced. The premises in Gudrunstraße are not as suitable for the purpose as at other locations.
The idea behind the Vienna Social Fund
In order to understand the conflict, one also has to know why the Vienna Social Fund (FSW) exists at all – and how it relates to the city. In 2000 the FSW was set up by the Vienna City Council. From now on, all activities of addiction prevention and help for addicts should be planned, coordinated and promoted by this newly established “private-sector organization”, according to the FSW in a self-presentation. In 2001, the FSW began its work under the leadership of Managing Director Peter Hacker – today’s Vienna City Councilor for Health. As a result, ever larger parts of Viennese social work were moved by magistrates to the FSW.
Hacker explained that in 2003 in the Wiener Zeitung: “My goal is to be able to offer more services in order to be able to offer the same money as before”. And: “Working time costs money and the employees in the social sector have to learn that slowly.” The Viennese social sector should become competitive. The Wiener Zeitung wrote about the reforms: “For Finance City Councilor Sepp Rieder, the creation of a modern management structure in this area is a leap in development. ‘This is a revolution.’ He also believes that such a step has long been necessary in order to meet the EU’s competition requirements. ”
Against the undercutting competition
The emergency quarter in Gurdunstraße is currently neither operated by the City of Vienna nor by the Vienna Social Fund directly in this structure. Instead, the employees are employed by the Arbeiteramariterbund. Their employment relationships are limited because the emergency quarters, like all emergency quarters in the winter package, are only open a few months per year.
The Arbeitersamariterbund operates the emergency shelter on behalf of the FSW. “We would have liked to continue running the emergency quarters if the FSW had wanted it,” Stefanie Kurzweil, spokeswoman for the Vienna workers’ maritime association, told MOMENT. “We depend on the City of Vienna to make another winter package and ask us to submit an offer for the operation of the emergency quarter.”
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