However, 7.6% for the January-March rolling quarter is a higher figure when compared to the immediately previous period, which was 6.5%.
According to the latest National Employment Survey (INE) corresponding to the rolling quarter January and March 2024, unemployment in the region reached 7.6%, placing O’Higgins below the national rate which reached 8.7%. These figures, when compared to the same date last year, show a decrease of 0.2%. Along the same lines, employed people reached 458,665, growing by 6.6%, equivalent to 28,401 male and female workers.
Regarding these results, the Seremi of Labor and Social Security, Jaime Chamorro, emphasized that “we cannot ignore that the economy of O’Higgins is characterized by seasonality, with sectors such as tourism or agriculture, which is reflected in a higher unemployment figure compared to the immediately previous quarter.” This previous figure was 6.5% for the period December 2023-February 2024.
Chamorro emphasized that “notwithstanding this, when making the comparison with the same period of the previous year, this latest report from the INE shows us positive figures that reflect the gradual recovery of jobs and a labor market that is providing jobs, with a drop in unemployment and employment that continues to rise, despite the pressure exerted by the growth of the labor force, which is close to 500 thousand people in O’Higgins,” he concluded.
For this moving quarter, the sectors that most influenced the increase in employed people were again Invoicing Industry with 24.2%, Commerce with 10.8% and Education with 27.6%. In both agriculture and fishing, they showed an interannual change of -9.7%.
Women in the labor market and informality in O’Higgins
Among other indicators reported by the INE, during the first quarter of 2024, the female unemployment rate in the O’Higgins Region stood at 9.8%, increasing by 0.5 pp. Despite this, women’s employment grew by 10.2% with 17,112 workers who managed to access employment. Meanwhile, the informal employment rate reached 27.8%, decreasing by 1.3 pp in twelve months, standing at 127,537 people.
