Job Miracle
January 31, 2012
In seasonally adjusted terms, January unemployment in Germany fell by 34,000 to 2,849,000, the German Federal Labor Agency said Tuesday. This is the third monthly fall in a row, bringing the adjusted jobless rate down to 6.6 percent in January from 6.8 percent in December.
Labor Agency chief Frank Weise pointed out, however, that unemployment tends to rise in the winter months as sectors such as construction slow down and workers are laid off due to the cold weather.
As a result, the raw or unadjusted number of people on the dole in January had risen slightly by 301,500 to 3,082,000.
"That was purely for seasonal reasons," Weise said, adding that "demand for labor remains high."
Looming clouds
The seasonally-adjusted jobless rate is in fact the lowest since German unification in 1991, and is better than analysts predicted. They had forecast a decline of just 10,000.
The drop reflected "solid domestic demand," said Uwe Angenendt of BHF bank. However, for the coming months he is less optimistic, predicting a "slowdown in job creation due to stagnating economic growth."
"Strongly declining unemployment figures will be a thing of the past," he told Reuters news agency.
Andreas Scheuerle of DEKA bank said that even a modest reduction in the months ahead would be a "big success."
"The labor market is testing its limits after making huge progress. We expect the average jobless number to come in at 2.9 million this year," he told Reuters.
The German Labor Agency, however, expects the boom in job creation to continue. "There are no signs that companies here are planning to shed workers in sizeable numbers," Labor Agency board member Raimund Becker said.
He noted that just 14 local agency branches out of total of 174 had reported "a worsening of labor market conditions."
In contrast, unemployment in the eurozone had risen to its "highest level since the introduction of the euro" in 1999, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said Tuesday.
16.5 million people were out of work in the 17 eurozone countries in December, Eurostat data show, representing a seasonally adjusted jobless rate of 10.4 percent.
Author: Uwe Hessler (dpa, Reuters)
Editor: Michael Lawton