Tag: unemployment

OECD says more people back at work in July as economies recover slowly – dpa international

Bus stop outside a Dublin café in July (Simon Roughneen)

Unemployment across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fell for the third consecutive month in July, the group’s Paris-based secretariat said on Thursday. As countries continued to mostly ease coronavirus pandemic restrictions, joblessness dropped by 0.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent of the OECD-area workforce. However, unemployment remained almost 1 per cent above the 5.27 per cent recorded in February last year, the month before the World Health Organizaton declared a pandemic and most countries imposed lockdowns that froze swathes of their economies. Overall, around 1.6 million people were taken off unemployment registers across the OECD in July, leaving over 41 million people without a job.

Unemployment to linger in Ireland after economy recovers – dpa international

Empty main street in Castlebar, a west of Ireland town, in early March 2021 (Simon Roughneen)

DUBLIN — Ireland’s economy could recover “quite strongly” from pandemic-related curbs in 2021, but employment is unlikely to bounce back for at least two years, according to the state-funded Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). In a report published on Thursday, the ESRI cut its earlier 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecast from 5.2 per cent to 4.4 per cent, citing the likely impact of Ireland’s ongoing third lockdown, which was imposed in late December. The ESRI said the revised projection assumes “a gradual easing of restrictions” from next month and that Covid-19 jabs “will facilitate the broad relaxation of public health restrictions in the second half of 2021.” Ireland’s economy grew by 3.4 per cent in 2020 on the back of record exports in multinational-heavy sectors that have thrived during the pandemic.

Third Irish lockdown sees January unemployment soar to 25 per cent – dpa international

Shopping in a west of Ireland town after the end of Ireland's second lockdown in early December (Simon Roughneen)

DUBLIN — Ireland’s third lockdown has seen unemployment jump to 25 per cent in January, a 5.6 percentage point increase on December’s revised 19.4 per cent. The government’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Wednesday that “the Covid-19 crisis has continued to have a significant impact on the labour market in Ireland.” A second pandemic-related lockdown ended in early December after six weeks, only for a third national lockdown to be enforced at the end of the month after virus case numbers rose again. Businesses that reopened during the brief inter-lockdown period, such as restaurants, were compelled to close again.

OECD joblessness fell in November but stays above pre-pandemic level – dpa international

Grocery shopping in a supermarket in Ireland, where restrictions have forced many businesses to close for longer than elsewhere (Simon Roughneen)

DUBLIN — Unemployment among the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fell to 6.9 per cent in November, the group’s secretariat reported on Wednesday. That is down from 7.1 per cent the month before, but still 1.7 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels. Overall, 45.5 million people were listed as unemployed across the OECD’s 37 member states in November, 10.7 million more than in February, the last month before governments imposed widespread restrictions in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The OECD said that unemployment among the eurozone countries decreased slightly from October to November, from 8.4 to 8.3 per cent, after month-on-month joblessness fell in Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal, but increased in France, Ireland and Spain.

Covid-19 spurs Singapore’s biggest unemployment jump since SARS – dpa international

Burmese migrant workers in Singapore's Peninsular Plaza, a popular meeting point for workers from Myanmar who live in the city-state (Simon Roughneen)

KUALA LUMPUR — Pandemic-stricken Singapore has seen its steepest drop in employment since the Severe Acute Respiratory System (SARS) outbreak of 2002-3. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Manpower announced that 19,900 jobs were shed during the first quarter of 2020, many of them in “consumer-facing food & beverage services and retail trade, and tourism-dependent accommodation,” which the ministry stated were among the sectors “most severely affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.” The job losses exceed those seen during the global financial crisis of 2008-9, when trade and investment-dependent Singapore was the first East or South-East Asian country to fall into recession. Singapore has the world’s fourth-highest gross domestic product per capita, according to International Monetary Fund rankings, and its overall unemployment rate remains a low 2.4 per cent.

Despite growing economies, nearly one billion Asians in vulnerable jobs – Nikkei Asian Review

JAKARTA — Despite decades of world-beating economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into middle class life, around 900 million more Asian workers remain in what the International Labour Organization deems “vulnerable” employment. Vulnerable employment refers to people who lack formal work arrangements or contracts, are often nonsalaried and working part-time in sectors such as agriculture or retail, and are sometimes self-employed. Such workers often can be fired without much notice and subsequently have no access to unemployment benefit.