Unemployment at its lowest since 1990

Down 14% since last year, unemployment hits lowest rate in two decades. Job market is on rise, Israeli Employment Service reports

Tani Goldstein|Published: 11.12.10 , 07:52

Over the month of September, 194,206 job seekers turned to employment agencies – 14% fewer than the number of job seekers in September 2009, the Israeli Employment Service said.

The figure constitutes a 2.5% reduction in the number of job seekers since August.

According to the Employment Service, the number of jobs is on the rise: More than 20,000 job openings were registered at the service in September, 8,883 of them for non-professional positions.

The number of unemployed individuals, which stood at 160,000 in the beginning of 2008, reached 208,000 in July 2009 – an unemployment rate of 7.9% – caused by the global financial crisis. It has been declining since.

Dark predictions have circulated in the job market over the past two decades, warning that immigration, reproduction, privatization, globalization and outsourcing will bring on massive unemployment. The data reported by the Employment Service show that the opposite has happened.

In 1990, the number of the unemployed stood at 158,000, while in the second quarter of this year, it stood at 182,000. Figuring in the growth of the population and the employment market, the figures constitute a sharp decline from an unemployment rate of 9.6% in the beginning of the '90s to 5.9% in the previous quarter of this year – the lowest rate in 20 years.

However, the rate of people who do not work in Israel is still high compared to other nations, largely because of the number of people who are not seeking work at all.