At the end of 2019, more than nine million people were in paid employment for the first time. This is reported by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in the monthly report on the labor force.
According to the CBS, the number of working people has risen almost continuously after the first quarter of 2014. “For a long time, unemployment fell, but during the second and third quarter of 2019, unemployment increased slightly.” This was mainly because more people wanted to work.
If those people do not find a job immediately, they are included in the unemployment figures. “That changed at the end of 2019. More people who entered the labor market immediately came to work and a smaller proportion became unemployed,” CBS said.
The number of people who wanted to work but did not have a paid job fell in the last months of the past year to 302,000 in December. The benefits agency UWV registered at the end of December that 223,000 people had unemployment benefits.
Among the over-50s, the number of unemployment benefits had fallen by more than 20 percent at the end of last year compared to a year earlier. This age group accounted for nearly 46 percent of all unemployment benefits, compared to 49 percent a year earlier. The decrease is partly due to the favorable labor market, the UWV says. But also gradually reducing the duration of the unemployment benefit contributes to this.
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