The Finance Minister was being insensitive to the plight of the 7,619 individuals who were unemployed this summer, PN spokesmen Tonio Fenech and Stephen Spiteri said.

The number, they said,  amounted to 13 per cent more people unemployed than in the same period last year.

In a statement, they said that the minister was ignoring these people, who all had a name, identity number and address and who were calling upon the Employment and Training Corporation because they had no job. They included 3,000 people who were 45 or older and for whom it would be hard to find a job without the Government’s assistance.

The spokesmen said the minister was ignoring the information given by the ETC which was based on an exact count of every individual at the moment they ended up unemployed and who were requesting the ETC’s help to find a job.

The minister also compared the August statistics to May’s when he should know well enough that all statistics’ agencies compared either with the previous month or with the same month the previous year.

The minister’s statement was worrying before he was not just trying to hide economic realities but also because it showed that the Labour government did not care for the unemployed and would not be presenting any plan of action to fight the growing unemployment.

The spokesmen expressed solidarity with the jobless and their families, as well as with other workers whose job was threatened.