Spain’s army of unemployed swelled to a record 4m in the first quarter of this year as hundreds of thousands of workers in services and construction fell victim to economic recession and the collapse of the country’s housing market.
Jobless numbers jumped by more than 800,000 in the quarter to reach 4.01m or 17.4 per cent of the workforce, double the European Union average, according to the National Statistics Institute. Spaniards have been losing jobs at the rate of almost 9,000 a day since January.
