BERLIN, April 30 (Xinhua) -- A record of 10.1 million employees had been registered for short-time work by April 26 due to the coronavirus crisis, Germany's Federal Employment Agency (BA) announced on Thursday.
Compared to the last decades, this was an "unprecedented number" that far exceeded the amount of applications during the economic and financial crisis when German employment agencies had only received 3.3 million applications, BA noted.
"The coronavirus pandemic is likely to lead to the worst recession in post-war Germany," said Detlef Scheele, head of BA. "This will also put the labor market under severe pressure."
According to BA, the unemployment rate in Germany went up by 0.7 percentage points month-on-month to 5.8 percent in April as 2.64 million people had been registered as unemployed, an increase of 415,000 compared to April last year.
A further, significant increase in unemployment in Germany could only be prevented if coronavirus restrictions could be lifted again "in the foreseeable future," Holger Schaefer, senior economist for employment at the German Economic Institute (IW), told Xinhua on Thursday.
Unemployment in Germany was rising comparatively little, while the number of short-time workers was rising "explosively," said Schaefer.
The development of the unemployment and short-time work figures in April were showing "the severity of the crisis," but also that German companies wanted to hold on to their employees and expected to have work for them again soon, said Schaefer.
"The development shows that even in our country we cannot guarantee every job, but we will fight for every job," said Hubertus Heil, minister of labor and social affairs, adding that short-time work would secure "millions of jobs in Germany." Enditem
