The employment rate rose to 57.2% in February after falling to 57.1% in the previous month, according to the survey of Activity, employment and unemployment published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) this Thursday. The drop of six tenths in January had cut four consecutive months of recovery.
For last month, the employed were estimated at 1,668 million people, just over 3 thousand posts above January. The activity rate remained the same, at 61.7%. Meanwhile, if we analyze the last mobile quarter (December-February), the rate of employment averaged 57.3%, an improvement of 0.7 points compared to the previous three months (September-November).
On the other hand, unemployment stood at 7.3% in February —equivalent to just over 131 thousand people—. The rate represents a slight decrease of one tenth compared to January.
Despite the one-off decline in the labor market in January, the strong recovery in the labor market in recent months has left the employment at pre-pandemic levels and unemployment better than in the period before the health emergency —the lowest in six years—.
On the other hand, a negative figure that the INE survey for February showed was the rise in underemployment, which had been falling since last September. Between those months it fell 2.9 percentage points to 8.1%—but rebounded last month to 8.9%. In August 2021 it had reached its ceiling in more than a decade (11%).
