Feb unemployment hike not contradictory

(ANSA) - Rome, March 31 - The fall in employment in Italy in February after two months of growth was "foreseeable" and did not "contradict positive signals", Labour Minister Giuliano Poletti said Tuesday.
    The downturn "confirms the evaluation that at the tail end of a crisis things tend not to be stable," Poletti said.
    However, it "does not contradict positive signals such as the consolidation of renewed business and consumer confidence," he added.
    The minister's comments came after national statistics agency Istat released preliminary estimates for February putting unemployment at 12.7%.
    This represented a 0.1% rise over the previous month and a 0.2% rise over the same month in 2014, after a big drop in December and another fall in January.
    "The Istat figures should be read alongside those released by the national pension institute Inps concerning the drop in the use of temporary redundancy and those obtained from mandatory communications in January and February that show an upturn in the number of open-ended contracts with respect to the same months in 2014," Poletti added.