🔸ILNA news agency, in a report citing labor market experts, has written that the unemployment rate of about seven percent announced for Iran does not provide a complete picture of the country’s actual employment situation, and that lower economic participation and the expansion of informal jobs have distorted this indicator.

🔸Based on the data cited in this report, in the spring of this year, about 630,000 industrial jobs were lost, and the economic participation rate of women has also fallen from 16 percent in 1403 to 11 percent in the beginning of 1405.

🔸Mehrdad Darani, a labor relations and social security expert, also told ILNA that the number of Social Security Organization premium payers has decreased by about one million people over the course of a year; a point he said shows that a significant portion of the labor force has moved from formal, stable employment to informal, part-time, and service jobs.

🔸He emphasized that the current criteria for measuring unemployment consider people who work even for a short period during the week as employed, and therefore the official unemployment rate does not necessarily reflect the extent of recession and the decline in the quality of employment in Iran.