(Adds comment, chart) BRASILIA, May 27 (Reuters) - Brazil’s unemployment rate rose to a historic high of 14.7% in the first quarter of the year, figures showed on Thursday, as a record number of people out of work and other indicators pointed to general weakness across the labor market. The official unemployment rate rose from 13.9% in the three months through December, statistics agency IBGE said, in line with the median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists. IBGE said it was the highest unemployment rate since its series began in 2012, but added that seasonal factors were at play too. “Unemployment rates tend to rise at the beginning of each year as people hired at the end of the previous year are dismissed. These layoffs in the first few months of the year put pressure on the job market,” said IBGE analyst Adriana Beringuy. The figures also capture the early part of the deadly second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil that prompted new lockdown measures in many cities and has also sharply increased the death toll. Alberto Ramos at Goldman Sachs calculated that the unemployment rate would have been 20.6% had the rate of particiapation in the job market been the same as it was a year ago. IBGE said that the number of people officially unemployed rose to a new high of 14.8 million from 13.9 million in the three months to December, up nearly 2 million people, or 15%, from a year ago. Economy Ministry figures show record formal job growth in the first quarter of the year. But as Economy Minister Paulo Guedes again noted this week, the informal labor market has suffered most in the pandemic and remains weak. Some 85.7 million Brazilians had work in January, IBGE said, little changed from the previous quarter but down 7.1% or 6.6 million people from the same period a year earlier. The number of people entirely out of the workforce held steady at 76.5 million, IBGE said, but that was up more than 9 million people or 13.7% from a year earlier. IBGE said that the number of discouraged workers rose to a series high of 6 million, while the number of under-utilized workers rose by more than a million from the prior quarter to 33.2 million. Discouraged workers is the term given to people not actively looking for a job or who have not found one after a long time, usually because they have given up looking. The under-employment rate rose to 29.7% from 28.7% in the October-December period, IBGE said. Reporting by Jamie McGeever Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Frances Kerry Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.