2023-09-22 14:23:03
“In addition to being at the top of unemployment and precariousness in Europe, Spain stands out for having the highest rate of overqualification of employed people with higher degrees in Europe.” A resounding and conclusive statement that the experts from Fedea and BBVA Research have reached in their latest “Quarterly Labor Market Observatory” and that shows that not everything that the Government highlights in employment after the labor reform is gold. The report indicates that a structural imbalance continues to occur that has persisted for the last 30 years and that has not even been alleviated by the measures approved by Yolanda Díaz.
The report explains this imbalance is caused by “an excess supply of qualified workers in certain occupational profiles” and a supply that is not adapted to these qualifications, which has in turn caused higher education graduates to displace workers with secondary education. “toward more basic basic occupations.” This was explained yesterday by the Fedea researcher, Florentino Felgueroso, who specified that although in recent years the differences between the occupational adjustment of new entrants and those who have been in the labor market for longer have been reduced, this reduction has not been enough.
This occupational imbalance of university graduates has remained “stable” in the last three decades, so that the percentage of active university graduates who work in occupations of groups 1 and 2 – that corresponding to directors, technicians and scientific and intellectual professionals – has remained between 57% and 61%, with a slight increase in recent years. “Entry into the labor market is where the greatest imbalance occurs,” explained the researcher. By territory, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Navarra and La Rioja have the highest rates of occupational adjustment of their active university populations. At the opposite extreme are the Canary Islands, Asturias and Galicia.
Likewise, Spain continues to lead the quarterly rates of exit from employment towards unemployment, around 3% of employed people, and still exceeds that of the rest of the EU countries and more than doubles the EU average. 27. “This trend has barely changed since the end of the pandemic and with the labor reform, except for those under 30 years of age,” said Felgueroso, who insisted that the overqualification rate of Spaniards is the highest in the EU, with 35.9% in 2022, which means that “they are workers employed in a position for which less training is required”, with the aggravating factor that this situation has remained stable over the last three decades.
In general terms, the report warns that employment has lost dynamism in the third quarter of the year, for which it calculates a growth of just 0.3% compared to the previous quarter and 1.2% compared to the previous quarter. same quarter of 2022. For this reason, the head of economic analysis at BBVA Research, Rafael Domenéch, pointed out that “the labor market will lose strength” compared to the first half of the year, although “the unemployment rate will remain stable.”
What’s more, the observatory also points out that the 2021 labor reform has allowed the temporary employment rate to converge with that of the countries around us, but the exit rate from unemployment continues to be much higher than that of the rest of the countries in the region. The EU. “The success of the labor reform is having reduced contractual temporality” by seven points to 17.3%, says Doménech, but he specified that it is a “short-term effect, because no improvement in output is observed.” from salaried employment to unemployment or inactivity”. At least there has been some stability in the exit from the labor market for the population as a whole because the “increasing weight of ordinary permanent workers compensates for the increase in exits to unemployment or inactivity of temporary and discontinuous permanent workers,” Felgueroso pointed out.
The researcher also pointed out that many young students work during the summer season, but later abandon employment, because “their occupation is different”, so “these dismissals are counted in the trial period and they do not have the right to compensation, when before “Yes, they did have it because they were temporary contracts.”
With regard to productivity, the increase in hours per worker allowed real productivity per employee to increase in the second quarter of the year after three quarters of declines and compensated for the decrease in productivity per hour worked, which has grown uninterrupted since the second quarter of 2022. However, output and hours per worker have not recovered to the pre-pandemic level, while productivity per hour worked was barely 0.1% higher.
On the contrary, in the second quarter, nominal remuneration per employee in Spain was 9% above the pre-pandemic level as a result of the signing of the new collective agreement between employers and unions, but the increase in remuneration per hour worked was higher, up to 12%. Regarding the problem of job vacancies that are not filled, Domenéch has warned that their level “will continue at maximums”, which together with the reduction in unemployment, will cause the “difficulties in making job matches” to continue, which could “accentuate wage pressures.”
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