News
The people’s paper ISSUE NO. 1857
4 - 10 February 2021
MALLORCA • WWW.EUROWEEKLYNEWS.COM
FREE • GRATIS
BETTER NEWS
ECONOMIC RECOVERY: Unem‐ ployment fell in January for the second consecutive month and the number of self‐employed workers has increased, being the highest number of self‐employed ever recorded in a January. Although there is no magic so‐ lution to employment in the Balearics, the government has an‐ nounced that for the second month running fewer people are unemployed than at the end of November. The figures aren’t enormous but do appear to show a positive trend according to the Minister of the Economy, Tourism and Work, Iago Negueruela as he revealed the January unemployment figure
Minister Negueruela delivered the welcome news.
PLAZA MAYOR CLOSED ALTHOUGH there appears to be an overall decline in the rate of new Covid‐19 infections in Mal‐ lorca, the organisation known as Resistencia Balear (Balearic Resis‐ tance) is at loggerheads with the Balearic Government. Last Saturday (January 30), even though its Facebook ac‐ count was suspended due to nu‐ merous complaints against its contents, the organisation which accused the social media compa‐ ny of ‘censorship’ went ahead with its threatened demonstra‐ tion in Palma. The authorities had approved a demonstration on the under‐ standing that it could only be con‐ ducted by people in cars and oth‐ er enclosed vehicles in order to
ensure safe social distancing. With a ‘rallying call’ ‘¿Salimos de paseo?’ (Are we going for a walk?) however, it appeared like‐ ly that many demonstrators would ignore the restriction and this proved to be true with many people turning up on foot despite pleas from the police not to. This then resulted in the issu‐ ing of fines said to amount to more than €140,000 after organ‐ isers encouraged people attend‐ ing to dance to music they played for them so there were effective‐ ly two different breaches of the law, firstly gathering in public and secondly holding a party. Nothing daunted, at very short notice, a new demonstration was called for Wednesday February 3
in the Plaza Mayor with a differ‐ ent slant, which called for those participating to bring food, blan‐ kets and items for babies to dis‐ tribute to those suffering from the current State of Alarm. Víctor Sánchez a spokesman for Resistencia Balear, explained in a video that there was a right to demonstrate and that people needed food which they were going to distribute.
In the event, however, this at‐ tempt to shame the Balearic Gov‐ ernment into allowing the distri‐ bution of the food on humanitarian grounds was un‐ successful as the government simply sealed off the Plaza Mayor to frustrate the meeting. Time will tell whether this will be the last of the public protests or whether they will continue at the weekend.
of 83,341 was down by 938 com‐ pared to December. Overall, there are some 412,115 registered as employed across the islands and although this is nearly 4 per cent less than the same time last year, it is similar to the number employed in Jan‐ uary 2018. Despite the obvious problems caused by the lack of tourism, the number of self‐employed workers also increased for the second con‐ secutive month and is up by 0.3 per cent in January, which is tradi‐ tionally the worst month in the year for employment. Acknowledging that unemploy‐
ment is still a problem, the minis‐ ter indicated that there are now 35,156 supported via ERTE (fur‐ lough), an increase of 14 per cent over the 30,838 registered in De‐ cember and the increase is at‐ tributable to the closure of many hotels due to the pandemic. There are a number of resi‐ dents receiving some form of fi‐ nancial support from the govern‐ ment as they register to find work and in year‐on‐year terms, De‐ cember unemployment rose by 22,486 people (37 per cent), re‐ flecting much higher rates of rising unemployment than the average across Spain of 21.8 per cent.