Spanish jobless claims rise in March

Bloomberg

The number of Spaniards filing for jobless claims surged in March, the latest example of how the coronavirus pandemic is upending people’s livelihoods around the world.
The increase in jobless hits particularly hard in Spain, where the unemployment rate is already 13.8%, among the highest in the developed world. The Labour Ministry said claims rose by 302,265 people in March, the highest monthly increase on record. The services sector saw the most significant jump in the unemployed, the ministry said.
The March figures don’t include the hundreds of thousands of workers who have been temporarily laid off, a ministry spokeswoman said. Those people are set get their jobs back once the government ends the lockdown and normal business is able to resume.
Spain is one of the countries at the center of Europe’s coronavirus outbreak, with more than 9,000 deaths. In mid-March, the government ordered most people to stay home and since then companies have furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers. A similar situation is unfolding elsewhere, with jobless claims jumping in the US, and thousands of companies in Germany cutting workers’ hours.
The crisis could hit Spain’s labor market particularly hard because the lockdowns have shuttered the tourism
industry, a key part of the economy. Tens of thousands of Spaniards were gearing up to work during the summer high season, when visitors flock to the country’s beaches, museums, restaurants and bars. Spain is one of the most visited countries on earth and tourism makes up more than 10% of output.
March through June is usually the time of year that brings the greatest volume of hiring in Spain and the greatest seasonal decline in the unemployment rate, economists at Fedea, a Madrid-based think tank, wrote in a research paper.
“From a labor market perspective, the coronavirus crisis has exploded at the worst possible time of the year” in Spain, the economists, including Florentino Felgueroso, wrote.
Spain’s labour market still hasn’t healed from the last crisis when the country sought billions of euros in funds from the European Union and others to avoid a financial meltdown.
Its unemployment rate spiked in the aftermath of a banking collapse. Since then, its jobless rate has fallen steadily from a post-crisis high of nearly 27% in 2013, but the level of unemployed in Spain remains the highest in the EU after Greece.