Coronavirus caused unemployment to soar in April by 282,891, or 8%. That represents the largest increase in the month of April in the entire historical series, according to data from the Ministry of Labour and the Social Economy published on Tuesday. Moreover, 25% of those in work and registered for Social Security, 3.4 million people in total, are affected by an ERTE.
In this way, almost 3.9 million people were unemployed at the end of April, the highest figure on record since May 2016, having increased by 7.97%. The unemployment data for April, like that for March, does not include those workers who have been temporarily suspended from work or whose hours have been reduced as a result of an ERTE, since the definition of ‘registered unemployed’ does not consider them to be unemployed. It should be noted that April saw the destruction of fewer jobs than March.
