Spain today has 1.8 million more workers than in June 2018, when Pedro Sánchez arrived at Moncloa, but despite the strong job creation in these five years, the number of unemployed in the country has only dropped by 362,300, according to the EPA, and continues to exceed the 3 million barrier. The unemployment rate has gone from 15.2% to 13.2%, but it is still double the EU average.
There are several problems that continue to characterize the Spanish labor market and that will remain pending for the next legislature and who knows if for the next one, since they are evils that seem congenital to employment in Spain, such as the high rate of youth unemployment, the large number of of ‘ninis’, the evolution of the hours worked, the temporality triggered in the public sector, the increase in sick leave or the conciliation problems suffered by women above all.
Even so, neither the pandemic, nor the war in Ukraine nor the inflationary wave that has hit the Spanish economy in recent years have prevented the labor market from resisting strongly. At the end of May, Social Security had 20.8 million average affiliates (1.8 million more than at the end of June 2018), of which 1.3 million have joined the private sector and 462,878 in the public sector .
Companies have been the engine of job creation in the country, although not all the jobs created since then are salaried: the country today has 72,000 more self-employed workers than five years ago. Of all the new workers we have, 1.2 million are born in Spain and 580,123 are foreigners who have gradually joined our labor market.
In this period, to preserve employment, the Temporary Employment Regulation Files (ERTE) that were deployed during the pandemic (allowing companies to keep their workforce without activity and without involving a cost, thus avoiding them resorting to employment) have been essential. to layoffs). This served so that, once the activity in the country was recovered, the workers returned to their jobs. The State assumed the payment of benefits and the bonus of social contributions, but in exchange the level of employment was maintained.
Later, at the end of 2021, the approval of the labor reform – agreed with unions and employers – made it possible to modify the structure of the labor market in Spain, since by restricting the use of temporary contracts and promoting their replacement by discontinuous permanent ones (contratos that allow employees to be ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the activity, without losing the employment relationship), the temporary employment rate in the private sector has fallen from 27.2% to 13.7%.
This positive phenomenon for the stability of employment does not hide, however, that there is still a high level of precariousness for those who do not have an ordinary permanent contract (since discontinuous permanent contracts are not guaranteed in all sectors a minimum of work per year), nor nor does it solve the lack of reliable official data to find out how many intermittent permanent workers are in a situation of inactivity each month, that is, without working and receiving or not receiving the unemployment benefit, since they are not computed as unemployed in the statistics of the Public Employment Service State (SEPE).
This is something that the academic community, the opposition, the companies and even the unions have repeatedly asked the Government: to make public the number of people who are not really working every month, which they have called ‘the effective unemployment ‘, which adds to the official unemployed all those who in practice do not work. The Ministry of Labor has been promising for months that when it has the “refined” data it will publish it, but for the moment that moment has not arrived and that opacity gives free rein to criticism about the existence of unemployment that does not appear in the data.
The high temporary employment rate in the public sector is another of the major problems in the labor market and has gone from 24.9% to 31.3% in the last five years. One in three people who work in the Administration have temporary contracts -in some cases lasting only a few days- with what this entails for their personal stability. The Government has committed to Brussels to cut temporary employment to 8%, but the truth is that far from implementing measures to achieve this, it continues to use temporary workers to reinforce some organizations such as SEPE.
Added to the precariousness of those who are intermittently permanent and spend long periods of time without work or of public employees who chain contracts, is that of wage earners who would like to work full-time but have to do so part-time due to their circumstances. For example, there are 1.3 million employees who are not working full time because they cannot find an eight-hour job, because the boom in underemployment that followed the 2008 financial crisis has not yet been reversed.
In the last five years, conciliation problems have intensified for many families (especially for women), which is reflected in the increase of 81,200 people in the number of part-time workers because they have to care for relatives , or in the 31,400 more who are with this type of contract because they have to meet obligations.
However, the biggest drama is not experienced by those who work fewer hours than they would like, but by those who are forced to leave the labor market to face these tasks. They are the inactive, who neither have a job nor are looking for one, and who have increased considerably in the last five years, by 690,000 people.
In total, 636,000 people in Spain do not work or seek employment because they have to dedicate themselves to caring for children or the sick, 25% more than in the second quarter of 2018, since improvements in facilities to balance life have not been sufficient personal and family, such as the equalization of maternity and paternity leave up to 16 weeks approved in this legislature.
The increase in the duration of paternity leave has contributed to an increase in the number of sick leave (now there are 531,000 more each quarter), although the main reason is due to the aging of the population, according to data from mutual insurance companies. .
This increase in sick leave and permits, together with part-time work and the rise of discontinuous permanent contracts -which do not work during some seasons-, cause the recovery of employment in the number of employed to be very out of step with the recovery of employment in hours worked. The country has 5.7% more workers, but the average number of hours worked per week has fallen by 5.1%. This phenomenon, which is common to other EU countries, is also influenced by the sectoral restructuring of employment.
Beyond these trends, the biggest losers in the Spanish labor market are young people, since 22% of those between the ages of 15 and 29 would like to work but cannot find a job, according to Eurostat, compared to 10.9%. community average. Although youth unemployment in our country has fallen (in 2018 it was 26.5%), the improvement has been greater in other countries, with which we have gone from being the third worst in the EU to occupying last place.
Part of the unemployment problem is justified by training and by the fact that Spain has a higher proportion of overqualified young people (with studies) than the EU average and also a much higher number of people without training, but has a shortage of profiles with an average technical qualification (that is, with a Vocational Training degree). The Executive has committed in the Recovery Plan to promote VT and, especially, its dual modality (which promotes practices), but the country has a lot to do on this path.
Spain has also worsened its relative position compared to other European countries in proportion of ‘ninis’, young people who neither study nor work, and now stands in the eighth worst position in the EU (in 2018 it was tenth), despite the fact that this collective has been reduced from 15.3% to 12.7%.
For young people, the rise in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage that has occurred in the last five years, of 46.7%, going from 735.9 euros in fourteen payments to 1,080 euros, has meant a strong improvement in their purchasing power, although it must be borne in mind that, as various experts have warned, the increase in the SMI may pose a barrier to entry into the labor market for people without experience.
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