The employment rate among Arab women reached an all-time high of 40.3%

Employment in the Arab sector rose sharply in the third quarter after the opening of the economy and the cessation of unemployment benefit extensions. The employment rate among Arab women reached an all-time high of 40.3%. Arab young men and women returned to the employment level of the quarter before the corona. Arab men also saw a sharp rise, but there is still a gap from the first quarter of 2020 and a large gap from their employment rates in the middle of the previous decade. This emerges from the recently published file of the government's employment targets of the Central Bureau of Statistics.
According to the file, the employment rate of Arab women aged 25-64 reached a peak of 40.3% in the third quarter. This is compared to 38.2% in the first quarter of 2020, which is mostly before the corona, and even lower rates at the end of 2019. The employment rate of young women aged 24-20 reached 27.7%, just like in the first quarter of 2020.
In Arab men the picture is more complex. The employment rate of young men at these ages reached 54.1%. This is an impressive jump from 43% in the second quarter of 2021 and slightly more than 53.8% in the first quarter of 2020, before the corona. However, it cannot be ignored that in the years before the corona (2019-2015) the employment rate of young Arabs was 68% -65%. Even if some of the decline in youth employment can be explained by an increase in the rate of students in academia, there is still a difficult problem.
The situation is no less problematic among Arab men aged 64-25. Their employment rate rose significantly from 64.9% in the second quarter of 2020 to 68.1% in the third quarter. However, it is still far from the employment rate in the first quarter of 2020, which stood at 70.9%.
This figure is also much lower than the employment rate of Arab men in the years 2019-2015, which ranged from 78% -75%. That is, there is a serious problem of Arab men escaping from the labor market.
It is likely that the large increase in the employment rate in the Arab sector between the second quarter and the third of the year was mainly due to two events. The first is the opening of the economy without closures, including the recovery of retail trade and the construction industry. The second is the decision of Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman to end the extensions of unemployment benefits at the end of June, ie at the end of the second quarter. This seems to reinforce the claim that unemployment benefits encouraged low-wage earners, many of them in the Arab sector, to stay at home and not work and also encouraged "black" work in parallel with unemployment benefits.
In another target population - the ultra-Orthodox, similar lines have not yet been registered. The employment rate of ultra-Orthodox men was 51.1% in the third quarter of the year, down from 51.6% in the second quarter.
The employment rate of ultra-Orthodox women was 76.6% in the third quarter, still lower than the rate of 78.1% in the first quarter of 2020, before the corona. It is likely that in the fourth quarter there will be a further improvement due to the return of many educators to work.