Ankara's labor data veils thousands of unemployed people's desperation
The Turkish Statistical Institute's labor data once again concealed the struggle of thousands of unemployed workers in its October numbers, the daily Birgün reported on Jan. 12. An average 8,600 workers lost their livelihood each day in October, the daily noted.
Duvar English
The Turkish Statistical Institution's (TÜİK) concealed the severity of unemployment in Turkey by manipulating data once again in its October numbers, the daily Birgün reported on Jan. 12.
The number of workers who were employed decreased by 260,000 according to TÜİK data, meaning that an average 8,600 workers lost their jobs each day in October.
While one fourth of more than four million unemployed workers in Turkey has been out of work for an extended period of time, an estimated 1.51 million workers are thought to have stopped looking for work out of despair, effectively excluding them from the workforce in TÜİK's measurements.
The number of the "hopelessly unemployed" has grown by 126 percent in the year preceding October, meaning that an average of 3,600 workers lost hope of finding employment each day.
Another unfortunate statistic is the inequality between men and women in the category of workers who reported they're not actively looking for work, not because they lost hope for finding a job, but because they are held back from an active job search by familial or logistical reasons.
The number of those who can't actively search for a job, dubbed "workers who are ready but not searching for employment," increased by 103,000 in October, 87,000 of whom were women.
Broadly defined unemployment includes a shocking 9.7 million workers in Turkey, which constitutes 27 percent of the population, according to the labor data calculated by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK) in compliance with International Labor Organization (ILO) guidelines.