translated from Spanish: Minister Zaldívar on the more than 100,000 layoffs since the crisis: “We don’t yet know how much it will cost these people to find a new job”

Labour Minister María José Zaldívar expressed her concern and uncertainty about the increase in unemployment figures resulting from the social outburst. Since 18 October, 100,626 redundancies have been registered “for the needs of the company”. In this sense, the secretary of state argued that “the problem is that we do not yet know how much it will cost these people to find a job again.”
With regard to the figure revealed by the Directorate of Labour, which shows that in the first days of December there were 25,832 disengagements of workers in the country, the labour owner, in conversation with Radio Cooperative, indicated that “we have to contextualize this data well.” “In a normal month, we are talking on average 40 thousand disengagements. This 100 thousand figure incorporates two months: two weeks of October, the whole month of November plus a week of December,” he explained.
In this sense, Zaldívar said, “What is the problem and where are we concerned? That in a normal month, those 40,000 people who were disjointed didn’t take long to find work, and that’s why we had an unemployment rate of around 7%. The problem is that we don’t know yet how much it’s going to cost these people to find a job again.”
“The situation for us is exacerbated, because we have the month of December and January, which are two months where the figures can be left a little disguised by the fact that these are periods when there is intensive part-time hiring,” he added.
Finally, the lawyer warned that “we are going to reach double-digit unemployment if we don’t stop the violence and if we don’t take the right steps to be able to reverse this situation.”

Original source in Spanish