Last year’s EU Labour Force Survey (LFS) indicated 152 million EU people with a job, 42% of them women, Eurostat – Statistical Office of the European Communities in Luxembourg – reports¹ today. This was an EU employment rate² of 61% in the spring 1998.

The jobless rate was 10.2%: 17.3 million people (almost half of them women) with no job but available and looking for one. Of this total, a quarter were under 25.

The British employees had the longest working week for those working full time – at 44.0 hours, 3.5 hours more than the EU15 average and 4.3 hours more than the average euro-zone worker. See table.

Other key findings:

• Highest employment rate was Denmark’s 75.3%, lowest Spain’s 49.7%.
• Over 26.4 million or 17% of the 152m with jobs said they worked part-time; 8 out of 10 of these were women. More than 19m part-timers said they were not available for full-time work; more than 8 out of 10 of these were women.
• EU-wide, 33% of female employment is part-time; highest by far is the Netherlands’ 67.9% followed by the UK’s 44.8%. Nearly 1.9 million unemployed women said they were looking for a part-time job.
• Of the 125.5m people with a full-time job, only one in three were women.
• 13% of all employees had a ‘contract of limited duration’. This ranged from 2.9% in Luxembourg to 32.9% in Spain. EU figure for the under-25s was 37.6% (73.1% in Spain).

Jobless rate of 10.2%

• The EU has a jobless rate of 10.2% in spring – 17.3m people (11.3% or 14.5m people in the euro-zone). Lowest was Luxembourg’s 2.8%, highest Spain’s 18.9%, with Finland next at 13.2%.
• Nearly half the jobless had been so for over a year.
• 21.2% of the unemployed were looking for their first job – over half in Italy.

Nearly two-thirds work in services

• Of the 125.5m in full-time work, 103.8m were employees, 19.7m were self-employed and 1.9m were family-workers. Women accounted for little more than a fifth of the self-employed but nearly two-thirds of family-workers.
• 65.7% of total jobs were in the service sector (80.2% of women’s jobs). Employment in services was lowest in Portugal (50.2%) and Greece (58.9%). In Belgium, UK, Sweden, Netherlands and Luxembourg it topped 70%.
• EU-wide, only 4.8% were employed in agriculture – ranging from 1.7% in UK to 17.8% in Greece.
• Highest employment in industry was in Portugal (36.0%). EU-wide it was 29.5%.
• EU-wide, nearly six million women said they would like to work but were not seeking it; nearly half-a-million said this was because they believed none was available. Over 75m women said they were ‘non-active’ because they didn’t want to work.

UK has longest working week

• Across the EU, employees in full-time work (men and women) averaged a 40.5-hour week (48 minutes less in the euro-zone). Longest working week was in the UK – 44.0 hours; shortest in Italy (38.5), followed by Belgium (38.6) and Denmark (38.7).

¹ Eurostat Statistics in Focus, Population and social conditions, no 11/99 : “Labour Force Survey – Principal Results 1998”

² Employment rate is people in employment as a percentage of the population aged 15-64 living in private households.

³ 1997 data for Ireland

NB: Concepts and definitions follow International Labour Organisation (ILO) guidelines.