Around 3,000 roles were lost in hotel and catering, retail, industry, transport, business services and temporary work in Luxembourg as a result of the health crisis Shutterstock

Around 3,000 roles were lost in hotel and catering, retail, industry, transport, business services and temporary work in Luxembourg as a result of the health crisis Shutterstock

While roles were lost in hotel and catering, retail, industry, transport, business services and temporary work, new posts were created in healthcare and social welfare, education, public administration, construction, IT and finance, according to a Statec report published on Thursday.  

“This development means that Luxembourg has done better than other euro area countries,” the report author wrote.

Any celebrations will be shortlived as recent trends do not bold well for the fourth quarter of 2020. “Employment has been slowing since the summer, particularly because of public employment (probably due to the end of contracts relating to the reopening of alternating classes in schools),” the report said. Unemployment fell in September but the pace of change slowed, compared to the summer. And new job vacancies remained at below 500.

People on temporary contracts appear to be worst hit with numbers down 13% in July, compared to before the crisis. “These workers were among the first to lose their jobs at the very start of the lockdown, despite employment recovering in construction, where most temporary workers are employed.”

Partial unemployment measures, introduced to subsidise salaries of businesses in difficulty, remain in force. In September and October they concerned 25,000 people, compared to 1,000 before the crisis and the record of 150,000 (34% of paid employment) in April.

These along with other crisis measures helped bring unemployment in Luxembourg down to 6.3% in September. The number of jobseekers remained 21.7% higher than in September 2019. At the same time, the number of jobs posted at Adem was down 7.8% compared to a year earlier.