Employment in the OECD area: unemployment at 4.9%, but the organisation flags weakening

The picture that the OECD presents in the Employment Outlook 2026 holds together two opposite movements. On one hand, the aggregate figures remain good: in the first quarter of 2026 the labour force participation rate in the area stands at 76.7%, and in May 2026 unemployment stands at 4.9%. On the other hand, the organisation records growing signs of weakening, which it lists explicitly: unemployment is rising in many member countries, employment growth is slowing, and the labour shortages that characterised previous years are easing.

It is a combination that makes the average figure of little use taken on its own. It is no coincidence that this year’s edition devotes particular attention to geographical disparities in jobs and incomes: the relevant distance is no longer just between one country and another, but between territories within the same country.

At national level, the Italian case is among those in which the two movements coexist in the same figure. The employment rate reaches its highest ever recorded level in the first quarter of 2026, 62.8%. In the same quarter the OECD area average stands at 72.1%: the gap is around 9.3 percentage points. The internal record and the external gap are two readings of the same time series, and neither cancels the other out. A country can improve relative to itself and still remain, in absolute terms, in the lower part of the area’s ranking.

The second element that the OECD isolates concerns not how many people work but under what conditions they can change jobs. In 2025 non-compete clauses — agreements that prohibit an employee from moving to a competitor for a period after the end of the employment relationship — affected around 30% of workers in the area. The organisation notes that their use is spreading beyond the original scope of highly specialised roles, where the traditional justification is the protection of confidential knowledge. This figure has a direct bearing on how the labour market functions: mobility between firms is one of the channels through which wages adjust when demand for labour changes.

A note on the material. The figures reported here currently come from a single source, the OECD itself, which is the institutional and primary source of the document; no independent confirmation is available at this time. National employment data produced by the statistical institutes of individual countries may differ in definitions and reference periods, and comparisons should be made using harmonised series.

A concrete implication remains for those reading these numbers from an economic policy perspective: if labour shortages ease while unemployment rises again, the lever of voluntary mobility loses strength precisely at the moment when thirty out of every hundred workers in the area move with a non-compete contractual constraint behind them.

Source: OECD, Employment Outlook 2026 — Italy country note.