The employment situation in Finland is weaker than it was a year ago.
Statistics Finland reported that the unemployment rate among persons aged 15 to 74 years old was 8.2 percent in June, the same figure as a month earlier in May. In June of 2023, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent.
In the second quarter of 2024, there were 36,000 fewer employed persons than in the corresponding quarter of 2023. The employment rate — the proportion of the employed among the population aged 20-64 years — was 78.2 percent in June, compared with 79.8 percent for this age group a year earlier.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment said that the number of unemployed jobseekers rose by 28,600 from June last year. There were 23,800 new job vacancies. Overall, there were 60,100 job vacancies in June, 63,700 fewer than a year ago.
The total number of unemployed jobseekers in Finland at the end of June was 293,300. This was 28,600 more than a year earlier and 27,000 more than in the previous month.
In the ministry's survey, the total number of unemployed jobseekers included clients of local employment and economic development offices, municipal experiments and furloughed workers.
Signs of labour market trending upward
The unemployment rate among members of the YTK Unemployment Fund, Finland's largest private unemployment fund, was close to its year-on-year level of six percent in June.
Unemployment among its members fell by 1.4 percent from May.
The fall in unemployment was the fastest since the spring of 2022, YTK said in its press release. Unemployment among 17-30-year-olds fell the most, dropping from 25 percent to five percent.
Henna Busk, Senior Economist at Pellervo economic research PTT, said that the number of employed persons has not decreased any further during the summer, and the rise in the unemployment rate has stopped.
"These are possibly signs of an improvement in the labour market, but we will only see for sure later in the autumn whether there has been a turnaround," Busk said in PTT's press release.
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