Nations around the world are still struggling with high levels of unemployment as sectors such as retail, entertainment and travel, which tend to be labor intensive, are either closed or only partially operating. The OECD unemployment rate fell 0.6 percentage points in August, to 7.4%, but remained 2.2 percentage points above the level observed in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the labour market. Nearly 48.4 million persons were unemployed in the OECD area, 13.5 million more than in February. The OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 37 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. The rebound in employment largely reflects temporarily laid-off workers in the U.S. and Canada returning to work, where they were recorded as ‘unemployed’. <img src="https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates-1024x811.jpg" alt="" srcset="https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates-1024x811.jpg 1024w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates-300x238.jpg 300w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates-768x608.jpg 768w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates-750x594.jpg 750w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OECD-unemployment-rates.jpg 1140w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="811"> In the euro area, where temporary lay-offs are not included in unemployment statistics, the unemployment rate continued to increase (to 8.1% in August, from 8.0% in July), with increases of 0.3 percentage point or more in France (to 7.5%), Lithuania (to 9.6%) and Spain (to 16.2%). In Canada and the United States, headline unemployment rates continued to fall, as ‘temporary lay-offs’ returned to work. In August, the unemployment rate fell by 0.7 percentage point, to 10.2%, in Canada, and by 1.8 percentage points, to 8.4%, in the United States. In September, the unemployment rate continued to fall in Canada (to 9.0%) and the United States (to 7.9%). However, excluding temporary lay-offs from unemployment statistics reveals a similar upward trend in unemployment, since the onset of the pandemic, to that seen in most other countries. On this basis unemployment rates were 3.9 and 1.6 percentage points[2] higher in Canada and the United States in August compared with February. In August, in Japan, the unemployment rate increased to 3.0%, from 2.9% in July, but it decreased by 0.2 percentage point in Mexico (to 5.0%) and by 0.7 percentage point or more in Australia (to 6.8%), Colombia (to 17.5%) and Korea (to 3.2%).