The real unemployment is much higher than the one registered by the Greek Statistics Authority ELSTAT, the Labor Institute of Private Sector union GSEE (INE-GSEE) claims.
The Institute estimates that 800,000 people are long-time unemployed and the unemployment rate is 30.8%, while the ELSTAT said it was 23.4% for the month of August 2016.
According to daily Naftemporiki, the scientific team of INE-GSEE tries a different assessment to the unemployment statistics.
Making reference to quarterly surveys, the Institute estimates that the rate of unemployment reached 30% in the second quarter of 2016. This is marginally lower than the one of the corresponding period in 2015, when the unemployment rate was at 31.7%.
The latest ELSTAT report speaks of 1,126,455 unemployed, of 3,228,437 inactive and of 3,687,465 employees in terms of the total population.
According to Eurostat, the long term unemployment rate is defined as the percentage of unemployed in the total active population who are unemployed for more than 12 months. As for the overall working population, this is calculated from both the employed and the unemployed.
According to the interim report of October, INE-GSEE says that calculation of real unemployment has to use a new system and should count also people looking for work who were not available or who were under-employed during the period the ELSTAT collects the data.
According to ELSTAT, employed is also he who worked for one hour per week during the data collection period.
It is obvious that an employee stating that he works even one hour per week can not simply be considered as “employed”, as it practically impossible to be able to survive with just a few hours of work in a month. That is: this employee is practically unemployed.
Even in terms of statistical measurement, a man with a few hours work a month is facing dramatic shortages of basic goods and services related to a decent living.
PS People work in black labor market, others are registered for ridiculously short- and part-time contracts, some get a job for 2 hours per week. It is more than clear that as the labor market developed in Greece, people working in the statistics will have to invent new tools to catch the real unemployment rates.
These SYRIZANEL Quislings have no imagination. All they need is to pass a law (their parliament puppets will vote for anything) making it compulsory for everybody to work for one hour every week cleaning their nearby pavement for a fee of 1 cent paid by the state. This will immediately put unemployment figures to zero. Problem solved.