One in 10 of the euro zone workforce is now unemployed, the EU said today as the human cost of the economic crisis was laid bare.
New figures for November 2009 showed that the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate hit a miserable 10%, with 102,000 more people left without a job compared with October.
More than three million people have fallen from the euro zone workforce over the past 12 months, when the rate stood at 8%. Almost five million more are gone across the full, 27-member European Union.
The Eurostat agency estimated that 22.899 million men and women across the EU - which also takes in non-euro and recession-mired Britain as well as eastern industrial powerhouse Poland - were out of work in the run-up to Christmas.
Of those, 15.712 million were in the euro zone economy.
The unemployment rate throughout the EU as a whole was registered at 9.5% in November.
Q3 euro growth figure confirmed
Separate figures from Eurostat confirmed that the euro zone's economy grew by 0.4% in the third quarter of this year, as it emerged from recession.
Eurostat's new estimate made some small changed to some sections of the statistics. It said inventories added 0.5 percentage points to the overall result rather than 0.3 points in its earlier estimate.
Net trade added only 0.1 points, rather than 0.2 points, Eurostat said, and it revised the contribution from investment to a negative 0.2 points from the previously reported -0.1 points.
Eurostat also revised upwards the annual GDP growth figure for Q3 to show a contraction of 4%, rather than the 4.1% drop previously estimated.
