COVID-19 Pandemic: Decline in Employment and Rise in Unemployment Continue in April

The massive decline in employment that began in mid-March as a result of the measures taken by the Government to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic continued in April. Compared to April 2019, the number of employees fell by 188,905 to 3,582,751 (–5.0 percent). After the record unemployment rate in March 2020, unemployment continued to rise until mid-April, before coming to a halt in the second half of the month. At the end of April, 571,477 unemployed persons and persons in training measures were registered with the AMS, 8,955 (+1.6 percent) more than in March 2020 and 210,275 (+58.2 percent) more than in April 2019, respectively. While the number of training participations fell by 24.2 percent due to the discontinuation of training practices, the number of persons registered as unemployed increased by 76.3 percent in April.