“Today we have an unemployment rate which is the lowest in fifteen years. “It is a satisfaction that the Head of State granted himself on the employment front, Wednesday evening on TF1. Defending the economic measures taken to deal with the Covid-19 crisis, Emmanuel Macron took up an argument he had already put forward in November.
FAKE OFF
Has the President of the Republic got it right? It all depends on what he means by “unemployment”. There are indeed two ways of calculating the unemployment rate, such as remind the services of the Dares, a department of the Ministry of Labor responsible for producing studies and statistics.
An unemployed person is a person “without a job”, who is “available to take a job within 15 days” and who has “actively looked for a job in the previous month or has found one which starts in less than three months”. It is this definition – which is also that of the International Labor Office (BIT) – that INSEE uses to calculate the unemployment figures.
Thus, a senior close to retirement, registered with Pôle Emploi but who is no longer actively seeking a job, will not be counted among the unemployed. On the other hand, a young person actively looking for a position, but who is not registered with Pôle emploi, will be counted.
Unlike the senior, this same young person will not however be considered as a job seeker by Pôle emploi, because not registered with its services. Pôle emploi considers that a job seeker in category A fulfills three conditions: to be registered with Pôle emploi, to be required to perform positive job search actions and not to have worked during the month.
What do INSEE’s calculations say about the president’s statement? The unemployment rate for the third quarter of 2021 amounts to 8.1% of the working population. If we go back fifteen years, in the third quarter of 2006, INSEE then counted an unemployment rate of 8.6%.
This rate then fell until the first quarter of 2008, when it reached its lowest rate in fifteen years, at 7.2%. The same rate was then observed in the second quarter of 2020, when many companies benefited from support measures to face the global health crisis.
If we look at the figures from Pôle emploi, the number of job seekers in category A was lower fifteen years ago. With 3.3 million job seekers in the third quarter of 2021, there are 960,000 additional job seekers compared to the third quarter of 2006. The number of job seekers in this category, after increasing in 2020, however returned to the level of the fourth quarter of 2019, before the health crisis.