Not a single job of the nearly 300,000 created throughout 2022 ended up in the hands of Spaniards. What’s more, for the first time in history in a year of economic recovery, employment for nationals was destroyed, while all the new affiliation has been thanks to foreigners.
Specifically, throughout 2022, 278,000 new contributors joined, of which 240,200 were immigrants and 43,100 had dual nationality (mostly people from Latin America who have been residing in Spain for many years), according to data from the latest Survey Active Population (EPA). On the contrary, 4,400 positions occupied by Spaniards disappeared, something unprecedented.
It supposes, therefore, a total break with the natural trend that the Spanish labor market maintained year after year until now. Until 2019, the vast majority of new jobs were for Spaniards, except for specific cases, related to the stage of massive arrival of immigrants. But in 2019 a change is already taking place and it even ends with half of all employment created for foreigners. This phenomenon worsened in 2020 and, before the pandemic wreaked its havoc, there was a ‘sorpasso’ and immigrant work surpassed Spanish. Now, at the end of 2022, it has even turned around and all the jobs created have been for foreigners.
This change in trend – which will also worsen in the coming years, since it is expected that more than nine million immigrants will arrive by 2050 – also occurs in the midst of a debate on whether to facilitate the arrival of foreigners to fill vacancies in the construction sector, which warns that they will need half a million workers for the next four years.
However, the unions and Unidas Podemos, led by Vice President Yolanda Díaz, are strongly opposed to bringing foreign labor to the country of three million unemployed. “We are not going to join this easy trend that will end up saying in a short time that in Spain people do not want to work,” the UGT general secretary, Pepe Álvarez, recently said.
less qualification
But the question is that of those three million unemployed, more than 2.5 million are Spanish and, nevertheless, no employment has been created for them in the last year. What are the causes? The main reason must be sought in the sectors in which employment was created, because “there is beginning to be an overrepresentation of foreigners in sectors such as services and construction,” according to Javier Blasco, director of the Adecco Group Institute.
Indeed, the service sector, especially the hotel, trade, transport and logistics sectors, boosted employment in 2022, to the point that it added 314,000 affiliates. Jobs have also been created in the manufacturing industry (55,300), but at a much lower rate and mainly for laborers, and some in construction (14,900 new contributors). These are lower-paid jobs and for which less qualification is required, which is why they are occupied to a greater extent by immigrants, points out Andreu Cruañas, president of Asempleo, the employers’ association of the temporary employment agencies.
On the contrary, members were lost in banking and insurance, in professional, scientific and administrative activities, as well as in education, while it remained practically stable in health; sectors all with more presence of Spanish workers.
It is true that the biggest drop occurred in agriculture, where there is also an abundance of foreign labor, but CC OO points out that these nearly 87,000 fewer workers left the field to work in other sectors, largely due to a lower agricultural production as a result of drought and frost.
Worse performance than a sector as touched as agriculture was recorded in self-employment. 2022 ended with 111,200 less self-employed than in 2021, the worst data since the series has existed, in more than ten years. It is mainly due to three sectors: commerce, hospitality and industry. Thousands of commerce and hospitality businesses were forced to close last year due to the lack of direct measures on this sector, according to complaints from the organizations of the collective.
On the contrary, the number of civil servants has skyrocketed, mainly in the second half of the year, and reaches a new maximum above the 3.5 million barrier.
sharp slowdown
This strong loss of self-employed workers is especially important since it is usually an early indicator of the evolution of employment in the coming months, thus reflecting that there will be a sharp slowdown at the beginning of the year.
This is also predicted by Blasco, who predicts that “the stage of strong recovery is over and now a stage of mini-growth is coming”. The expert warns that “there is a lot of uncertainty in the regulatory framework and that clearly harms our ability to catch the train of industrialization to the slipstream of European funds” and requires “a more flexible model” that can easily adapt to economic cycles, something to what “the labor reform has not helped”.
This slowdown has already been noticed in the final stretch of 2022, when the labor market already felt the impact of the war in Ukraine and the price crisis and registered the worst data in the last nine years. This has caused the number of unemployed, despite falling by almost 80,000 since 2021, to rise again below the psychological barrier of three million and the rate is already dangerously close to 13%, a level that -according to experts- is will exceed in the coming months.
Another worrying fact is that long-term unemployment is growing again and now reaches the figure of 1,282,000 unemployed with more than a year in this situation. Spain is the second country in Europe with the most unemployed for more than four years. “We must act on this underlying issue and mobilize resources,” claims Cruañas, who denounces that “the endemic problems of our labor market continue to be seriously addressed.”
It should be noted, however, that more than half of the employment created in 2022 was for those over 50 years of age, while there was a strong destruction in the range between 35 and 45 years of age. “In the environment of economic crisis, the workers in those intermediate bands, who work with short-term contracts and do not have enough seniority to get out of the dismissal, pay more,” explains Blasco. Almost 140,000 jobs were also generated for those under 30 years of age and almost 70,000 for those between 45 and 50.
More balanced was the employment created based on sex, to the point that 146,000 male affiliates and 132,000 female contributors were added.
The rise of discontinuous landlines reduces temporary employment to a minimum but not in the public sector
The year 2022 began with changes in labor legislation that marked a before and after in hiring. The veto on temporary employment imposed by the labor reform has placed it at minimum levels that are close to the European average, after years in which Spain has been at the forefront. Thus, in twelve months the rate has fallen 7.5 points thanks mainly to the rise of permanent discontinuous workers and has gone from exceeding 25% in 2021 to closing 2022 below 18%, according to the latest data from the EPA.
However, all this sharp fall has been carried out by the private sector, while the public sector maintains its temporality at alarming levels, which exceed 30%. In other words, companies have had the absolute leading role in this historic milestone in which, for the first time in decades, an endemic evil in the labor market such as temporary employment falls significantly.
The debate is: is it all about makeup or has it really been reduced? Andreu Cruañas, president of Asempleo, the ETT employers’ association, points out that this is due to the fact that the norm has prohibited temporary employment by vetoing eventual contracts, but it has not eliminated it. “Reality has not changed for the worker, who continues to be employed for the same amount of time, receiving the same salary but, on the other hand, now they do not have compensation if their contract ends,” he points out.
It refers to the fact that the number of people who signed a permanent discontinuous contract in 2022 has more than doubled and exceeds 833,000, a group that appears as indefinite in the statistics and does not count as unemployed, despite the fact that they may be several months a year without working. Therefore, when their activity ends, they do not receive the 12 days per year worked that they were compensated for when they were temporary.
Cruañas, however, does recognize that the labor reform has contributed to reducing fraudulent temporary contracts, but considers that the part that is due to the seasonality of the Spanish economy is covered under the discontinuous permanent contract. “The same need as before continues to exist, because the production model has not changed, only that the reform has reduced its number, duration and causality,” he concludes.