What Is Seasonal Unemployment?

Seasonal unemployment refers to unemployment caused by intermittent production characteristics in some sectors.

Seasonal unemployment

For example, some actions or departments

There are two main reasons for seasonal unemployment:

The demand for labor in some sectors or industries fluctuates with seasonal changes, such as

(1) Strong geographic region;

(2) There are large differences in industries;

(3) Regularity;

As technology advances, seasonal unemployment tends to decrease.

Seasonal unemployment is a kind of natural unemployment, which brings two adverse effects to society: First, seasonal employees' income is affected due to the short employment time (although there are compensatory wage differences); second, seasonal unemployment is not good for Effective use of labor resources.

Career guidance for seasonally unemployed should focus on information services to guide them in temporary employment in flexible forms (such as part-time work) during the off-season.

Although seasonal unemployment is a normal type of unemployment, it also brings two adverse effects to the society: First, seasonal workers 'income is affected due to short employment hours, which is not conducive to the stability of workers' lives; second, The seasonal unemployment of workers is not conducive to the effective use of labor resources, causing a certain amount of human waste.

In order to reduce the impact of seasonal unemployment, many economists advocate the government to strengthen the forecast of seasonal unemployment period, in order to facilitate seasonal workers to make early employment off-season arrangements. In addition, they also suggested that the government set a reasonable period of unemployment benefits to reduce the living difficulties of seasonal workers.

The above four types of unemployment, namely frictional unemployment, technical unemployment, structural unemployment and seasonal unemployment, are all inevitable lower levels of unemployment in the competitive labor market, namely normal unemployment. This is what American economist Friedman called "natural unemployment rate", that is, the unemployment rate when the labor market is in equilibrium. The natural unemployment rate is about 4% to 6%, and its existence does not affect the realization of full employment.