The Communist party was quick off the mark today as the new unemployment figures showed a rise in February in the face of government assurances that all is well and the economy is booming.
The PCP said that the number of unemployed Portuguese keeps increasing, "Despite the already very high unemployment level in Portugal, since last September unemployment has continued to grow, reaching 14.1% in February with 719,600 unemployed," said José Lourenço, from the committee of economic activities of the PCP.
Lourenço added that between September 2014 and February this year, "about 56,000 jobs have been destroyed in Portugal."
"The trend is clear, unemployment is increasing despite what the Government says and job destruction is constantly increasing, this is an unequivocal information from data released today by the National Statistics Institute," he continued.
According to the Institute, in February the unemployment rate was 14.1%, 0.3% higher than in January this year but 0.8% down on the same time last year.
The Institute also revised upwards the unemployment rate for January, which increased from its initial estimate of 13.3%, to 13.8%, according to the latest data.
The figures have not been welcomed in government circles. Despite the obvious manipulation of the figures the coalition still can’t make the figures go in the right direction.
In February, about 719,600 people were unemployed, up 11,700 from January with an employed population of just 4,399,900 people in a population of 10.5 million.
José Lourenço also criticised the lack of job creation and accused the coalition of trying artificially to reduce the unemployment rate by "thousands of internships, training courses and contracts of employment-integration."
