Redundancies up, unemployment up, employment up

4 Sep 2007

According to figures released by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment yesterday redundancies up to August 2007 were 10.4% higher than the same time last year. On average there are 2,100 redundancies per month – should this trend continue then redundancies for 2007 will be heading for 26,000 and potentially their highest level ever.

On the other hand the Central Statistics Office issued their report for Quarter 2, 2007 from the Quarterly National Household Survey today. In this report the CSO noted that employment grew by 3.9% and now there are 2,095,400 people in employment. Women accounted for 57% of the growth in employment and this means that Ireland has now achieved the Lisbon target of 60% of employment rate for women.

In the recent QNHS reports, construction has been the sector with the biggest growth in employment. Not too surprisingly with a slowing down in the housing market it was surpassed today by ‘Financial and other business supports’, which reported an employment growth of 20,300.

“However even though there was a growth in employment again this quarter, unemployment also rose,” noted Bríd O’Brien, senior policy officer with the INOU. What is striking about the rise in unemployment to 4.6% is the rise in short-term unemployment and is distributed almost 50-50 amongst men and women.

“The decline in long-term unemployment is welcome but the INOU will continue to call on the Government to strive to eliminate long-term unemployment altogether through more pro-active training and employment programmes and services,” continued Bríd. Long-term unemployment now stands at 28,400 or 1.3%.