The data revealed yesterday by the president of the IEFP, who said that the unemployed registered in the Algarve have halved in two years, they are “absurd”, guarantees António Goulart, coordinator of the Union of Unions of the Algarve.
Goulart accuses the Government of "manipulating data and elements" at a time when elections are approaching.
To António Goulart, who reacted with laughter to Jorge Gaspar's statements yesterday, to Sul Informação, the drop in the number of unemployed could only be justified by two factors: “one is emigration. Some thousands of people from the Algarve, out of the 400 nationwide, went to another country looking for a job because there wasn't one here. So it was reduced, they left for another country».
Afterwards, he added, “the panoply of tricks of the Government's skills in the sense of not qualifying unemployed people as unemployed is known. Internships or employment-insertion contracts refer to another condition of people who are unemployed, that is how they manage to artificially reduce the number of unemployed».
However, the union leader says that, even so, he has doubts that these numbers have been reached: «just look at the INE unemployment rate – which is worth what it is worth – which said that, in the first quarter of this year, the Algarve had 16 % unemployed, the highest rate in the country. It is very high in any context! To say that [the number of unemployed] has dropped from 40 to 20 thousand is absurd, even with all the juggling that the Government has used, and with the fact that there has been emigration».
For Goulart, «unemployment in the Algarve has not been reduced to half of what it was, neither close nor far! There continues to be unemployment on an overwhelming scale. Every day there are companies closing, such as the Southern Lithograph, which sent 44 people out of work, or to portway a few months ago».
“It's absurd!” he reinforces. «If all this were true, it would be good for the president of the IEFP to notice that the biggest previous unemployment crisis in the Algarve was in 1992 and had 20 thousand unemployed. What I would be saying was that we have reduced the number of unemployed to the numbers of the worst unemployment crisis that has occurred in the Algarve, before this one», he adds.
The approach of elections is the reason António Goulart finds for these statements. «It is a political declaration, in a context in which elections are approaching, and that this Government is trying to make the Portuguese believe that the reality is different. Data and numbers are being manipulated in order to make people believe that we are on the right path. We are not, we are in the wrong way, in the same way we were».
The statements of the IEFP president, “of scientific credibility, have nothing, they are made in the sphere of politics and bad politics. It's trying to create illusions and tell something that doesn't correspond to reality», he concludes.
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