George Papandreou Quotes
The unemployed in Greece can get a voucher and choose a training program somewhere in Europe to be retrained during this crisis and when this crisis is over, we make sure that that person hasn't fallen off the cliff and can come back into the labor market with new skills to find a job.
Papandreou, George. "Imagine a European Democracy Without Borders." TED, TED Conferences, June 2013.
When her husband was vice president she was at a Job Corps center to speak, but was asked by the press about rumors that her husband has been involved with another woman:
He wanted to condition long term unemployment insurance payments on the recipient taking training courses or other means of improving his/her skills and becoming more employable. He was opposed on the left by those who observed that this was insurance; the working nothing from the government; the worker had paid for it when he/she was working. It was his and was not conditioned on government requirement. The right wing opposed the idea as they had always wanted the out of work people to have little or no other opportunity than to take the worst and lowest paying jobs in the society. They also pointed out that if training was to be provided, it would cost more and not less. But Gingrich and his supporters on this idea observed that there were many jobs available even with the high unemployment rate; the unemployed workers just did not have the skills to do these jobs. Train them and unemployment would go down. The investment in unemployment insurance and training would pay off many times over.
The existence of a groups of de facto “unemployable” people has been with our country since its inception. However over time, the cadre of unemployable people has changed as the simple jobs are lost to automation and computerized solutions and the jobs that are left require an extensive education and skills set. While the New Deal programs helped reduce the numbers of unemployable people, and WWII required such great production, by the 21st century, the “unemployable” population had grown substantially and proportionately from 1936.
George Andreas Papandreou is a Greek politician who served as Prime Minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011. He is currently serving as an MP for Movement for Change.
