The sharp 24,000 rise in the jobless total in April is partly due to government policies and cuts in spending, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Friday.

‘The government has given unemployment a nudge in the wrong direction,’ a spokesman for the national statistics office CBS told the paper. ‘In the first three months of this year, 27,000 jobs were lost in education and government services.’
In 2009, the government was able to stem the rise in unemployment by stimulating the economy, the CBS spokesman said. Today people are not more likely to lose their jobs than they used to be, but they are finding it much harder to get a new one.

Long term
‘It is clear that long-term unemployment is increasing and that worries me,’ Maurice Limmen, deputy chairman of the CNV trade union federation told the paper. ‘More needs to be invested in finding new jobs and it is important attention is paid to stimulating the economy and employment levels.’
During Thursday’s debate in parliament on the government’s performance in the previous year, Labour leader Diederick Samsom called on prime minister Mark Rutte to explain ‘what has happened to the jobs motor?’.
‘It is not a question of exports, it is an internal problem,’ Samsom said. ‘Consumers have no confidence [in the economy] and are keeping their cash.’