I remember 2017, when the parties that today make up the government coalition said that “jobs are not created, the existing one is cut up”, since the hours worked decreased. With data from the latest EPA, in Spain the hours worked in 2019 have not been recovered. Although the number of employed recovers, the hours worked are 468,000 less than in December 2019. We are missing 9,000 weekly hours. What does it mean? It is not an exponential technological advance generated in three years, it is that Although the number of employed increases, part-time employment and temporary employment have increased much more.
This week what so many have denounced for a long time has been revealed. The Government has concealed the number of unemployed permanent discontinuous workers. The Government finally recognizes that there is 443,078 unemployed workers who do not appear in the official number of unemployed. It admits that there are more than 443,000 inactive discontinuous permanent workers and that more than half, 268,000 receive unemployment benefits. This raises the unemployment figure to 3.28 million, 11% more of what is published. But the data is more worrying.
If we look at the figures for job seekers for June 2018, they stood at 4,478,237 people. In February 2023, the number of total job seekers is 4,558,348. In other words, job seekers have increased compared to the beginning of the Sánchez government era. In that same period, “occupied” job seekers have skyrocketed from 841,047 to 1,135,108with data from SEPE.
The total number of unemployed job seekers stands at 3,116,050, when it was 3,422,859 in June 2018. Jobseekers move and some appear as “employed” when before they were not employed. But they don’t work. Government propaganda no longer talks about hours worked. They also do not say about the discontinuous fixed what UGT said in “The errors of the 2012 labor reform for today’s youth”, which he considered discontinuous permanents as an “example” of precariousness. Or what CC OO said, which stated that they replace “temporality with indefinite partiality as a flexibility formula.
They tell us that discontinuous landlines already existed. Sure, but they did not represent a distortion in the unemployment figure or close to what has been generated after the Labor Reform of 2022, in which it is forced to convert work and service and seasonal contracts into discontinuous permanent ones that, when they are not working , do not appear on the unemployment list even if they receive unemployment. The distortion generated by these contracts in the unemployment figure is not the same when the number of employed job seekers increases massively to over 1,100,000. In any case, the same ones who said that jobs are not created in Spain, unemployment is hidden and existing work is cut up they should be shocked by the current figures. The average duration of the contracts has been reduced to 51.8 days in January 2023 compared to 53.74 in January 2021 and 52.21 in January 2022.
In February, the annual increase in affiliation is a meager 3.4%, but it is alarming that discontinuous fixed lines increase by 105.6%, thirty-one times more than the annual increase, as explained by José Luís Fernández from USO. People with a permanent part-time contract grow more than twice as much as those with a permanent full-time contract.
As USO explains, “the one who works four hours a week is just as affiliated as the one who works forty”, which explains why the increase in Social Security contributors is not reflected in a similar increase in contributions in equivalent terms, that is, at constant taxes. Let’s not forget that the minimum contribution bases have risen by almost 44% between 2019 and 2022. The total number of full-time affiliates in the General Regime is only 44.8%, according to USO.
Spain closes February with the highest unemployment rate in the EU accepting the makeup mentioned above, well above Greece. It also leads the youth unemployment rate. According to UBS, Spain also has the highest “shadow” unemployment rate, which adds two percentage points to the official rate.
Indeed, there are more than 20 million affiliates, a positive figure, but, in addition to the decrease in hours worked and Social Security income in equivalent terms, we cannot forget that 55% of the net increase in employment in the legislature is jobs in the public sector, which mean more taxes and more costs on the private sector.
Government has had the support of the ECB, buying 100% of the net debt issued, and the permissiveness of Brussels to pull structural deficit and an increase in debt in the period 2019-2022 that puts us at the head of the European Union in increasing imbalances. No government counted on such a “stimulus.” Despite this, Spain closes with all these gaps behind Greece. There is no room for euphoria.