So what miracle saved the job market? While France experienced a recession of great violence in 2020, the dreaded spike in unemployment did not take place. The worst omens suggested, in spring 2020, that the number of job seekers could happily cross the symbolic 10% mark, given the upcoming social plans and cascading bankruptcies. A little over a year later, as the end of the crisis looms for the second half of the year, it must be said that the most pessimists were wrong. The labor market has emerged largely unscathed from the crisis.
With 2.4 million unemployed in the first quarter of 2021, the unemployment rate in the territory stood at 8.1%, up only a tenth of a point compared to 2020. By the end of the year, it is stability that prevails: Insee sees, in its economic report published on Thursday 1er July, the unemployment rate stood at 8.2% at the end of 2021. Overall, after the crisis, unemployment returned to its level at the end of 2019.
What made it possible to preserve the labor market in this way, while activity plummeted by more than 8% in 2020 and large parts of the economy were sluggish or even at a standstill? The first explanation lies in the partial unemployment scheme, which has enabled companies to keep their employees despite the drop in activity.
Indentation
The second explanation is to be found in the behavior of the employees themselves, who withdrew from the labor market for a few months, noting that they had little chance of finding a job in a sector in the past. stop such as tourism, hotel or catering. With the return to normal of activity, these “prevented” people should resume their job searches. According to INSEE, this would lead to an increase in the number of working people by 377,000 over the year, mainly in the second half of the year.
But this return will not translate into an increase in the number of job seekers, since certain sectors, in clear recovery, are recruiting with a vengeance: the statistics of recruitments of more than one month published by Acoss (Social security ) are back to a much higher level than before the crisis, underlines Philippe Waechter, chief economist at Ostrum Asset Management, in a blog article published on Wednesday, June 30. The construction sector already posts 47,000 more jobs than in 2019. Between the end of March and the end of June, salaried employment would have increased by 101,000 jobs, according to INSEE. The rebound would have mainly concerned the sectors which were the most affected by these restrictions: accommodation and food services created 51,000 jobs, and the reopening of the world of culture, museums, theaters, around 25,000 according to the report. ‘Insee.
You have 31.35% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.