Unanimity among experts on unemployment data: "They are distorted"
The offices of the
Public State Employment Service (SEPE) recorded
2.908 million registered unemployed
at the end of January
, 115,000 fewer unemployed than the country had in April 2022, the month in which the
labor reform
unfolded its full effects .
However, if
the 'effective' unemployment
is analyzed , that is, the real number of people who are without work and -in many cases- receiving a public unemployment benefit, we see that
unemployment has grown by 300,000 people
since April and that the real number of unemployed in the country amounts to
3.56 million people.
This was denounced this Wednesday by
Fedea and BBVA Research
during the presentation of their fifth quarterly Observatory of the labor market, in which they have warned that there are
652,000 people in Spain who are without work but are not included in the unemployment lists
.
This group includes the 16,000 who are affected by a Temporary Employment Regulation File (ERTE), those who are attached to social collaboration and who receive unemployment benefits or subsidies and, above all, permanent discontinuous workers who are in a
period
of of
inactivity
.
"The bulk of this group are the permanent discontinuous ones in a situation of inactivity," admitted
Florentino Felgueroso,
a Fedea researcher who is an expert in the labor market, who acknowledges that "'effective' unemployment is not an ideal measure, but it does serve to get out of the step because
the registered unemployment no longer serves to measure the situation
of the labor market".
It refers to the fact that since the entry into force of the labor reform and its absolute deployment as of the second quarter of last year, the workers who previously entered the world of work with a temporary contract have now come to have indefinite -ordinary contracts, in some cases, and discontinuous fixed, in others.
These last contracts allow the company to keep them active when it is active and, when it goes down, deactivate them, stop being registered with Social Security and start collecting unemployment, but without appearing as unemployed, having a
contract of work in force.
The fluctuation of the registrations and cancellations of discontinuous fixed to Social Security allows us to observe how the number of those who are active varies, but there is no
official record
in which to consult
how many are inactive,
something that has been claimed by the academic world and that the Ministry of Labor has promised to analyze.
It is curious that although since April 2022, more than 2 million discontinuous permanent contracts
have been signed in Spain
-ten times more than in the same period of the previous year-, the
number
of workers with discontinuous permanent contracts
registered with Security Social has barely changed
in this period.
"If we don't stop signing permanent discontinuous contracts, why does affiliation not increase?
Because there are many casualties due to the transition to inactivity
, which have doubled. In addition, there are many permanent discontinuous ones who leave the employment relationship due to dismissal or voluntary abandonment" Felgueroso points out.
Another consequence of the labor reform is that the
rate of permanence
in the company of workers with an ordinary permanent contract of less than a year has decreased considerably, due to the increase in cases of people who do
not pass the probationary period.
High temporality in the public sector
Although one of the main objectives of the labor reform was
to reduce temporary employment,
the decrease in temporary employment in contracts does not imply that the seasonal activity of the economy itself has ceased to be temporary.
Apart from the fact that this objective is difficult to achieve because of the public sector.
According to the data compiled in the Observatory from the EPA, in 2021 there were
27 occupations
that had a temporality
greater than 25%
and right now this number has dropped to
12.
Of these, the majority are
unskilled professions
-such as agricultural laborers ( with a rate of 53%) or construction (42.1%)- or activities with a
clear predominance of the public sector
, such as health (30.5%).
In all of them,
the temporary employment presented by the public sector is much higher than that of the private sector
, for example, in the case of
health
, it is
40.8%
compared to
11.2%
in the private sector;
or in
teaching
it rises to 37.3% compared to 30%.
"In order to compare the temporality of the public and private sectors, we have to choose comparable sectors, such as health and education. In education, if we correct for interim, the temporality of both sectors is quite adjusted. However, in health we have a rather big
drama
Because there, when you look at the data in depth, you see areas such as nursing and assistants where
there is a temporality that goes beyond the interim and that is very long-lasting
, "explains the Fedea researcher.
In these segments there are no oppositions, the calls take a long time and few places are available, so the temporary rate in the group of 50-year-old workers is also very high.
"
It is a group that has been in crisis for decades.
We are now paying for the emigration of health workers. But the health problem is not only ours, it is very European and it even occurs in the US, where they have been hiring doctors from Africa for years", points.
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