Wednesday, March 27

The employment record does not achieve that Spain falls below three million unemployed


The data on registered unemployment and Social Security affiliation for December, which also give the temperature for the year 2021 as a whole, have been hailed as “very positive” by the government and trade unions, and there are reasons for this: the total number of employed persons has climbed to its historical maximum, with 19.8 million contributors working; 10 months in a row have been concatenating unemployment falls (another unprecedented milestone) and the pre-pandemic levels of both one and the other indicator not only they were reached a long time agobut they are gone consolidating with better data as the year has been drawing to a close. And yet the level of unemployment remains above 3 million people: specifically, in 3,105,905, according to the records of the State Public Employment Service just before the start of 2022.

Why, when there are more people working than ever – more than in the summer prior to the bursting of the real estate bubble, when 19.5 million affiliates were touched – are there at the same time so many millions of unemployed, that is, people looking for a job without finding it? For two reasons, points out Antonio González, from Economists Facing the Crisis: because we are still absorbing the large number of unemployed generated by the financial crisis of 2008 -they reached more than 6 million in 2013, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics-, and because many of the unemployed have been in this situation for so long that their skills do not match what companies ask for.

“We are already seeing, at this time, that there are difficulties in finding workers with adequate training in certain activities, while more than three million unemployed people who do not find accommodation in the job market,” summarizes González, who advances a solution: “Or do a absolutely fast, intense effort, I would even say that huge, in Active Employment Policies (PAE), or we will find the problem that these bottlenecks are going to increase throughout this year: there will be more and more workers missing, and there will be more and more unemployed “Alert. Spain is committed to Brussels to undertake a reform of the PAE, which are aimed at improving the employability of the employed and unemployed, by the end of this year.

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For Maria Jesus Fernandez, Senior Economist at the Funcas analysis center, the problem of the training of the Spanish workforce is obvious in comparison with neighboring countries: “In Spain, 35% of the workforce has an educational level below from complete secondary school, a very high rate compared to central European countries, which are around 14%, “he explains. “At the same time, the proportion of active persons with a university education is very high here, higher than the average in other countries: so we have the problem in the middle. The challenge is to reduce the high rates of uneducated and give them adequate professional training “, he sums up.

A challenge that cannot be tackled quickly: “if deep measures were started right now, aimed at reducing the dropout rate and encouraging young people to stay in school, we would begin to see the results in 15 years at the earliest“, says Fernández. In terms of active policies, it is possible to go faster, according to González, but there is also a lot to do:” PAE and training systems do not work, because they are not consistent with the needs of the productive fabric, and this It is a problem that we have been dragging on for years; Even now, what is proposed in the Resilience Plan and in the framework of the commitments to obtain European funds are, in my opinion, totally insufficient proposals, “he regrets.

Changes in the law

Although education is key, according to those consulted, other factors can also help reduce the high level of unemployment. In this sense, experts are divided on the scope that legislative measures may have, and particularly the recently approved labor reform. For Jesús Lahera, Professor of Labor Law at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), this new norm “may serve to reduce unemployment levels if the measures to control temporary employment effectively achieve a less dual labor market [dividido entre indefinidos y temporales], because a high percentage of temporary workers is reflected in the unemployment rates in a structural way. “Also the experience of the erte and other flexibility measures and their consecration in the reform could, in his opinion, help to mitigate unemployment levels.

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For González, from Economists Facing the Crisis, there are no legal shortcuts to control structural unemployment: “this problem is not fixed with labor regulations or unemployment benefits,” warns this expert: “people who have been working for more than two years unemployed [un 27,5% de los desempleados, según el INE] He no longer receives aid and still cannot find a job. “Fernández, from Funcas, believes for his part that the reform that has just come into force falls short to fight unemployment intensively because “although it does not spoil some of the fundamental elements of the 2012 reform, it has not continued to advance in the direction in which it had to advance, that of flexibility, and maintains rigid labor regulations and overregulated, with the philosophy of protecting those in the workplace at the cost of creating less employment. ”

An optimistic possibility is that the reduction in unemployment will intensify as pre-COVID activity levels recover, which have not yet been reached: “If we are already at record levels of employment without international tourism or industry having recovered from the everything, maybe there still room to win more busy and reduce unemployment, “advances Ignacio Conde Ruiz, professor of Economic Analysis at the UCM and deputy director of the Fedea think tank, who in any case declares himself” perplexed “by the disparate behavior of production and occupation indicators.

The Spanish labor exceptionality: unemployment and temporary status

The two blemishes of the Spanish labor market since there are comparable records, in the mid-1980s, are the Very high percentages of unemployment and temporary contracts, always double those of the neighboring countries. According to the latest data from the European statistical office, Eurostat, the percentage of temporary employment in the European Union (EU) is 10.5%, compared to 20.1% in Spain, and unemployment is 6.7% in the EU and 14.5% in Spain.

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The lowest level of unemployment was reached, according to the Labor Force Survey, in the second quarter of 2007, and was 7.93%; yet more than 1.7 million people were unemployed at the time. It was just before the financial crisis, and as a result of that economic catastrophe, unemployment reached 26.94%: it was at the beginning of 2013, when 6.2 million people were looking for work without finding it.


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