Employment Policy Response to COVID-19 Crisis

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures implemented to curb it triggered an unprecedented economic crisis, manifested primarily in a surge in the number of job seekers (unemployed and furloughed employees), which has exceeded one million. Many of them are young people who earned lower-than-average wages and workers from the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and Israeli-Arab sectors, where employment rates had only started to rise over the last few years. Now, with the easing of restrictions on economic activity in most sectors, there is a need for a policy which emphasizes bringing back to work as many employees as possible, in order to raise the GDP, reduce poverty rates, and prevent a situation where workers ousted from employment end up in long-term unemployment, which makes it extremely difficult to get back into work.