Centeno says 1 million employees laid off

Portugal’s Minister of Finance Mário Centeno said yesterday that over one million employees are laid off.

It means that the state is paying the salaries of these workers under the simplified lay-off regime.
The Minister of Employment, Ana Mendes Godinho pointed to over 930,000 on Wednesday, while the Prime Minister António Costa spoke of “around a million”.
In recent weeks the Government had estimated that a million employees would adhere to lay-off, but that that estimate has already been overtaken.
In a parliamentary hearing Mário Centeno also revealed that: “each month of layoff that involved a million and a half workers could have an estimated cost of €1Bn.”