Some 500,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2020, mainly in the interim, according to figures revealed by INSEE Thursday.
“I hope that activity and growth will resume more quickly”, said the Minister of Economy, Bruno Le Maire, Thursday, June 11, on LCI. A hope formulated while pmore than 500,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2020, due to the coronavirus crisis, according to the final estimate by INSEE published the same day. Bad figures which are explained in particular by the collapse of the interim, under the effect of confinement, specifies the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. Decryption in infographics.
Wage employment drops 2%
Wage employment has plummeted in the past three months. In the first quarter of 2020, 502,400 jobs were cut. The number of salaried jobs therefore fell by 2% during this period, specifies INSEE. An even more pessimistic estimate than the provisional one published in May, which reported 453,800 jobs destroyed in the quarter. In detail, the collapse concerns almost exclusively the private sector, with 497,400 fewer jobs. The public service is more spared, but still loses 4,900 jobs.
The economic crisis linked to the coronavirus epidemic will continue to destroy jobs, warned Bruno Le Maire, Wednesday, before the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. The Minister of Economy said he expects to cut 800,000 jobs in 2020.
Temporary employment collapses by 40%
This contraction in salaried employment is explained by a historic decline in the temporary work sector. Between the end of 2019 and the end of the first quarter of 2020, the number of temporary agency workers fell by 40.4%, as shown by the yellow curve below. More than 318,000 temporary jobs were thus lost from the beginning of January to the end of March. By way of comparison, during the 2008-2009 economic crisis, temporary employment fell by 13.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The drop recorded during the first quarter of 2020 spares no sector, as illustrated by the graph below. The construction sector (in purple) was the most severely affected: the number of temporary jobs fell by 60.5%. In industry (in green), the fall is 40.7%. Finally, in the tertiary sector (in blue), there were 31% fewer temporary jobs at the end of March, than at the end of 2019.
Restoration particularly affected
However, excluding the effect of the temporary agency collapse, salaried employment nevertheless fell by 0.7% during the first quarter of 2020. Some 184,300 jobs were thus eliminated excluding temporary agency work. While all sectors are affected, some are more severely affected, as illustrated in the graph below. This is particularly the case for market services, such as accommodation and restaurants (in blue), where the number of jobs fell by 4.4% – or 150,300 jobs lost. Household services (in orange) are also strongly affected and register a 2.8% drop in employment. In addition to market services, salaried employment, excluding temporary work, has also decreased in the construction sector (in purple), an unprecedented phenomenon since the end of 2016. As for industry (in light green), employment there fell 0.4%. This is the first drop since the first quarter of 2017.
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