The unemployment rate climbs to 23.8%, about one million unemployed in Israel

The total number of active jobseekers in Israel is 988,957 (along with some of the active stabilizers from the period before the Corona crisis – about 160,000). As of the beginning of March: 831,106 new registrants – 89.7% of them in Israel.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) during the day, the number of unemployed in Israel is expected to cross the million checkpoint. This emerges from the summary of Black March data in the Employment Service.

At the beginning of March, the rate of unemployed workers in Israel was 3.9%, a very low number considered to be unemployment, ie one caused by work transitions. Since then, it has reached 23.3%, ie eight times one in four employees in Israel. The main reason for this is the government’s decision to encourage workers to take leave without pay. This is instead of opting for a partial payroll financing solution for employers so they won’t be fired.

The blackest day in the history of the Israeli labor market was Thursday, March 19, with 127,464 unemployed. The reason for this is not necessarily why so many people have been expelled to the USSR, but that upgrading the employment service site has allowed it to contain this amount of registrants.

A very worrying phenomenon was recorded at the end of the month. If in the first two weeks of the crisis only 5% of those enrolled in the service were fired, then in the last two days there was a significant increase to 9%. An increase in dismissal means that the employer does not even express an desire to return the employee to his or her job. This may also be related to the phenomenon that Social Security Director Meir Spiegeler spoke of yesterday in the rise in bankruptcy.

In all, this was the month of the USSR. 90% of the jobseekers who were registered with the Employment Service during the month were issued to the USSR and 6% were laid off. By comparison, by the time the crisis started, only 3% of jobseekers had gone on vacation without pay. This is a wave of unemployment that has a high attendance for young people. 46% of new unemployed persons, according to the Employment Service, are less than 35 years old. The difficult question is whether, following the crisis, the problem of unemployment among young people will also arise in Israel, as in some European countries.

58% of the new unemployed are women and 42% men. This compares with 55% women generally. Which means women are more hurt. 14% of the new unemployed are teachers and mentors, a figure that includes tens of thousands of contractor teachers, teachers who are employed through associations and who have no tenure. 6.5% are employees from the food and restaurant industry.