The ILO unemployment rate has sharply increased in the third quarter of 2020, from 4.9 % to 6.5 %. This is what emerged from the new results of Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, based on the Labour Force Survey. The ILO unemployed are all the people who do not have a job, but who are actively seeking work and are available to start working within two weeks. People who lost their job recently were also asked whether the coronavirus crisis played a part in this job loss. For 35.2 %, accounting for an estimated 70,000 employed persons, it was reported that this was the case.
The differences with the second quarter of 2020 are striking. Then, the impact of the coronavirus crisis was particularly visible in the drastically reduced working time. Furthermore, Statbel noted then a decrease in both the employment and unemployment rates.
The ILO unemployment rate is therefore moving in the opposite direction in the third quarter. Some of the people who (temporarily) did not actively look for work or were unavailable in the second quarter, for example due to child care, started looking actively for work again and became available again from the summer months.
Also the employment rate of people aged 20-64 went up from 69.6 % in the second quarter of 2020 to 70.2 % in the third quarter of 2020.
The share of employed people who worked less or did not work at all decreased from 34.2 % in the second quarter to 26.7 % in the third quarter. This percentage hardly differs from that of last year. In the third quarter of 2019, holidays were still the main reason for working less or not working. This is still the case in the third quarter of 2020, but less often.
The share of people who regularly or always work from home remains high, with 34.4 %. This is a small decrease compared to the second quarter of 2020 (35.9 %), but a large difference with the third quarter of 2019 (22.7 %).