Minister Ana Mendes Godinho reacted, in statements to Lusa, to the figures released by INE, according to which the employed population recorded, in the second quarter of the year, values ​​higher than those verified in the period prior to the pandemic (2019), reaching 4.81 million people are employed and an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent.

Ana Mendes Godinho expressed “satisfaction” with the “collective achievement of job maintenance and job creation capacity, during these difficult times of crisis”, stressing that “the historic maximum” was reached in relation to the employed population in the second quarter of 2021.

The government official highlighted “the positive evolution” of the unemployment rate compared to the previous quarter, which fell from 7.1 percent to 6.7 percent.

According to INE, the unemployment rate increased by one percentage point compared to the same period of the previous year, but decreased compared to the fourth quarter of 2019, the last before the covid-19 pandemic, highlighted Ana Mendes Godinho.

For the minister, the extraordinary support for employment allowed “to contain an evolution that could have been an uncontrolled evolution of the unemployment rate, similarly to what happened in the previous crisis”.

Therefore, she reinforced, “this is a collective achievement of everyone, the Government, companies and workers”.

Ana Mendes Godinho highlighted that in the second quarter of 2021 over 209,000 more people were employed compared to the same quarter of the previous year, “which is very impressive”.