Unemployment remained unchanged for the third straight month in the countries making up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), although the jobs picture continues to worsen in Europe, the Paris based group said Tuesday.

The OECD says that the overall unemployment rate was at 8.0% in May, unchanged from the previous two months. However, the jobless rate continued to push higher in the euro area, reaching a new record high since the early 1990s, up 0.1 percentage points to 12.2%.

Meanwhile, the jobless rate decreased in Canada in May, the OECD says, down by 0.1 percentage point to 7.1%; whereas it ticked up by 0.1 points in the U.S. to 7.6%. More recent data for June shows that the unemployment rate was stable in both the U.S. and Canada, it adds.

The gap between European unemployment and the OECD average has widened considerably since the beginning of the global financial crisis, it notes, now at more than 4.0 percentage points, compared to 1.7 points in July 2008. And, it’s particularly bad for young people, with one in three unemployed in Italy, Portugal and the Slovak Republic, and more than one in two are jobless in Greece and Spain.

Overall, there were 48.5 million people unemployed in the OECD area in May, 0.1 million more than in April and 13.8 million more than in July 2008.