An Ex-official of Iran’s Supreme Labor Council (SLC) has said the reason why the official rate of unemployment stated by the government is much lower than the real number, is that they consider even one hour of work per week as “employment” in their statistics, and as a result they deceive the public.
Seyed Hamzeh Darvari on September 15 in an interview with the state-run Fars news agency in the city of Sari said: “This formula is one of the ions defined in the ILO and appears to look right, but it is used only by international organizations such as ILO, WTO and IMF.”
“These statistics are useless and have no domestic benefits and the result of these statistics is ignoring the facts and deceiving the public”, he added.
Addressing the country’s statistics authorities, Darvari said: “Why do officials try to escape accountability for failing to meet their promises by relying on the formula of one hour work a week and playing with people’s feelings.”
“This formula is not an appropriate criterion to specify and announce the unemployment rate, and the unemployment rate and problems that exist in the society are not well defined by these statistics.”
Declaring that people feel the real unemployment rate is over 40 percent, Darvari said: “These are the available facts; the officials need to plan to resolve these cases.”