Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Kennedy Swarats­ingh says the near­ly 6,000 jobs lost dur­ing the first three months of 2026 should not be viewed in iso­la­tion, ar­gu­ing that the de­cline re­flects a re­cur­ring post-Christ­mas em­ploy­ment pat­tern and does not, by it­self, sig­nal a weak­en­ing labour mar­ket.

Swarats­ingh was re­spond­ing to a Guardian Me­dia re­port on the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice’s (CSO) lat­est Labour Force Sur­vey, which showed that the num­ber of em­ployed peo­ple fell by al­most 6,000 be­tween the fourth quar­ter of 2025 and the first quar­ter of 2026.

While not dis­put­ing the CSO fig­ures, the Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment said the more ap­pro­pri­ate com­par­i­son was be­tween the first quar­ter of 2025 and the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2026.