Snowball effect in unemployment

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Turkey’s unemployment rate jumped by 4.2 percentage points to 16.1 percent in the three months through March, compared to the corresponding period last year, an Ankara-based statistics agency said on its Web site Friday.

The number of unemployed increased by 1.125 million to 3.802 million over a year, according to the February Household Labor Force Survey.

The survey by the Turkish Statistical Institute, or TurkStat, covers the months of January, February and March. The jobless rate is the highest since records began in 2005, Bloomberg reported. The rate was 15.5 percent in the month-earlier period.

"Surpassing the January figures, unemployment has reached desperate levels with 3.802 million people," reported Anatolia news agency citing the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, or Türk-İş. The figures reveal that Turkey’s actual agenda is unemployment and poverty, according to the Türk-İş statement. The rise in the jobless rate deepens social problems, making the country a place of unhappy and hopeless people, it said, requesting urgent measures to prevent unemployment.

"It is obvious that the measures the Turkish government is taking against the crisis fail to prevent unemployment. The government should revise its anti-crisis policies, organize production by considering those making a living out of labor, and consider a vision that would assess social and economic issues together," it read. Turkey’s economy contracted 6.2 percent in the last quarter of 2008, the first shrinkage in seven years. The global crisis has slashed demand from Europe for Turkish-made goods such as cars, driving industrial production 23.8 percent lower in February, the biggest contraction since the statistics agency began releasing monthly figures in 1986.

The number of employed people decreased by 85,000 people to 19.779 million people in the period of February, compared to the same period the previous year, TurkStat said. The economy shed 291,000 jobs in services, construction and manufacturing from the year earlier, while agricultural jobs increased 206,000, TurkStat said.

The workforce grew about 1 million over the same period, it said. In this period, men constituted 73.8 percent of those who were employed.The workforce participation rate, a measure of how many people of working age are working or seeking employment, rose to 45.9 percent from 44.6 percent a year earlier, TurkStat said. The rate was 69.1 percent with a 1 percentage point increase for men and 23.5 percent with a 1.5 percentage point increase for women.



Unemployment in

urban areas

The unemployment rate increased by 0.7 percentage points to 18.1 percent in urban areas and reached 11.9 percent with a 3.4 percentage point increase in rural areas. In the February period, the unemployment rate in the young population was 28.6 percent. The rate was 21.5 percent during the same period of 2008, and 27.9 percent in the January period. Of those who were employed in the February period, 22.2 percent were employed in agriculture, 20.5 percent in industry, 4.9 percent in construction and 52.4 percent in services.

Employment in agriculture increased by 1.1 percentage points and services by 0.8 percentage points while that of industry was down by 1.7 and construction by 0.3. According Ministry of Finance data, the total employed in the public sector was 2.948 million in the first quarter of 2009.

The ratio of people who worked without any social security related to their main job declined by 0.5 percentage points to 40.8 percent.