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Business & Money

Unemployment levelling off: job agency

Published: 19 Jan 10 20:44 CET | Double click on a word to get a translation
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/24472/20100119/

There are signs that Sweden has left the worst of the recession behind, according to the country’s national employment agency, which forecasts a leveling off of unemployment during 2010.

Sweden’s National Public Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen) reports that 9 percent of the country’s workforce was unemployed or part of a government-sponsored job scheme in December 2009 compared to 5.8 percent at the end of 2008.

However both the number of job vacancies and the number of people finding jobs has started to rise and redundancies are becoming less common than a year ago.

“There are strong reasons to believe that we will soon leave the labour market downturn behind us,” said the employment agency’s deputy director, Lena Liljebäck, in a statement.

According to the employment agency, 30,000 people registered with the agency found jobs last month, which is ten percent more than the previous year. There were just over 28,000 job vacancies in the country, a thousand more than at the same time in 2008 and the number of redundancies was down by almost two-thirds.

Tom Sullivan (news@thelocal.se)

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22:07 January 19, 2010 by Nemesis
It is good that the jobless figures are not rising as fast.

Hopefully the jobless figures will soon start dropping.
23:38 January 19, 2010 by Puffin
A temporary lull until SAAB closes?
12:22 January 20, 2010 by biswa
I think this will be great challenge for sweden at latter time.Since sweden gives priority for swedish language people only for work. If it is easy for immigrant to get the job the country sweden would have develop a lot and raise its economic condition to high range reducing the unemployment rate. If the country can create jobs for capable immigrants who knows english rather then swedish, sweden can take lots advantage from the immigrant workers.
15:21 January 20, 2010 by chapora
I smell the sweet odour of male bovine droppings. However I would love for AF to be right in their predictions. BTW what has happened to all that money that was given by the govt towards setting up/paying for courses for the unemployed to help them back into jobs with real futures. I hear that quite a few pay rises were awarded to AF staff in recent months. Could a journalist perhaps investigate?
09:30 January 23, 2010 by IrvingD
Good work Sweden Government. Hopefully you will continue to support more job opening for your people since being unemployed is really hard. We cannot expect to have payday loans whenever we are in financial crisis. What we really need now is more decent and stable job with apposite salary that will help us finance our daily necessities. I just hope that both our national and local government will devise more strategic plans and actions to lower down the rate of unemployment as well as provide more jobs to our people for the coming months.
09:58 February 10, 2010 by gilbert_D
The job deployment would be so much easier if despite economic changes, the country has constant alternatives to make amends including job availability. The unemployment rate is at a record high point, but what's even higher is the rate of underemployment. More people are working in jobs that are below their previous salary level or qualification, and willing to accept lower salaries just to keep money coming in and not running for payday loans. The lower salaries have a lot to do with why people aren't spending as freely as they had previously. The numbers of unemployed aren't growing at as fast a rate as they had, which leads many to believe that the recession is ending.
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