“While unemployment was unchanged over the quarter, longer-term trends mean the labour market appears quite different to the same quarter last year,” said Abby Johnston, labour market spokesperson, in a statement.
Alan McDonald, Head of Advocacy at the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA), said it was “encouraging” that the unemployment rate remained stable.
“Unemployment is usually a lag indicator of the economic bad news and, while it’s too early to say the bad news has stopped, it’s encouraging that the number was stable rather than increasing, as had been widely expected,” McDonald said in a statement.
Despite this, he noted that calls on their AdviceLine service on redundancies and restructures remain at “very high levels.”
“However, last month they did drop off so we’re hoping, like the unemployment number, they may have reached their peak. Those processes usually take another two to three months to work through the system,” he added.