As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 16th of April, 2020, the Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK) announced that 1,478 people re-registered a jobseekers on Tuesday, and those individuals are mostly from the trade, accommodation, hospitality/catering and manufacturing sectors, which the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has hit the hardest.
Despite government subsidies of four thousand kuna per worker, with paid contributions on top of that, 10,385 former workers remained unemployed in Croatia this month, leaving 153,122 unemployed people registered as jobseekers on Wednesday, Novi list reports.
Since mid-March, when most economic activity was frozen due to the coronavirus crisis, especially in hospitality and services, the official number of unemployed people in Croatia has increased by 19,122, an increase of almost fifteen percent, which is more than enough reason for alarm. More than 560,000 workers received the first payment of government aid of 3,250 kuna in wages for the month of March, and that number is likely to be higher for April’s installment of that government-paid wages.
As previously stated, on Tuesday alone, the Croatian Chamber of Commerce said in a statement that 1,478 people had arrived to register themselves as unemployed, mostly from the trade (243), accommodation and hospitality/catering (235) and manufacturing (217) sectors.
Those same activities are also in the (unfortunately) leading positions when it comes to the two-week increase of unemployed people in Croatia, and the sad statistic here is that people from these industries account for as much as 74 percent of newly unemployed people registered in April.
As these are jobs where the average wages typically aren’t significantly higher than the state support offered, employers either estimated that after three months they wouldn’t start production again, or they decided to ”deal with” these former workers in a rather brutal fashion. This is more than likely because the Croatian Government didn’t make retaining all workers a condition for receiving this economic aid, but instead noted that that the number of employee dismissals must not exceed a certain percentage, and this then depended on the size of the company.
The Croatian Chamber of Commerce pointed out that the Croatian Employment Service’s daily data showed a declining trend in the daily unemployment rate last week, which was influenced by the second round of anti-coronavirus job retention measures introduced at the state level.
However, in April, this data altered once again, and the Croatian Chamber of Commerce has concluded that April will be the first month to break the declining annual trend in unemployment after 72 long months. Croatia’s employment patterns are very seasonal in their nature, and at this time of year it’s very common to see a dramatic drop in unemployment as Croatian employers the tourist industry snap up waiters, chefs, bartenders and more. The IMF now predicts that Croatia will have an unemployment rate of 11.5 percent this year owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
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