Jobless rate hits postwar high of 3.9%
Yomiuri Shimbun
The nation's unemployment rate increased 0.3 percentage point in
March from
the previous month to a postwar record high of 3.9 percent, the
Management
and Coordination Agency announced Tuesday.
The job offer-to-applicant ratio in March, released the same day by
the Labor
Ministry, decreased by three percentage points from the previous
month to
58:100.
This was the seventh consecutive monthly decline and the first time
the ratio
had fallen below 0.6 since July 1983, when it also stood at 58:100.
The figure means that there were only 58 job offers per 100 job
seekers.
The figures clearly indicated that the current economic slowdown is
continuing
to have a negative effect on the employment situation, analysts
said.
According to the agency's interim report, the number of unemployed
people
increased in March by 430,000 from a year ago to a record 2.77
million.
As a result, the seasonally adjusted jobless rate surged to a record
3.9 percent,
agency officials said.
The rate jumped due to a continuing rise in redundancies as companies
restructure and a slowdown in the increase in temporary jobs, they
said.
Unemployment rates among the young and the elderly reached
double-digit
figures for the first time. The number of unemployed graduates hit a
record
high of 260,000, the officials said.
There were indications that students and retired workers were
finding it
difficult to get jobs, they said.
The overall unemployment rate for fiscal 1997 was the highest annual
figure
ever at 3.5 percent.
By sex, the unemployment rate for males increased 0.2 percentage
point from
the previous month to 3.9 percent and for females it was up 0.4
point to 3.8
percent--also record figures.
By age, the unemployment rate of males between 15 and 24, which was
not
seasonally adjusted, stood at 10.1 percent and that for males
between 60 and
64 was 10.4 percent.
It was the first time the rates reached double-digit figures across
all age
categories since 1954, when the survey began.
The number of redundancies increased by 190,000 from a year ago to
740,000. This was the sixth consecutive monthly rise since October
last year,
the officials said.
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