2023-07-20 16:58:27
The hospitality industry, a fundamental sector in Spain, a country with a great weight of tourism in its economy, has not yet recovered the employment levels prior to the pandemic despite the fact that tourism is already registering new records. Thus, it has 17,000 fewer workers than three years ago, when covid-19 broke out, and almost 20,000 fewer than in 2019, according to data from the first quarter of the Active Population Survey (EPA).
Currently, there are 1.56 million people employed in this key sector, 7.6% of the total, of which almost 1.2 million belong to the catering branch and more than 366,000 to the accommodation branch. This last branch does exceed pre-pandemic employment levels from 2022 and concentrates 24% of workers in the sector, while food and beverage services continue at lower figures than those of 2019 and employ 76%, according to the report ‘Labor market in the hospitality sector’ published this Thursday by Randstad Research.
The clearly predominant employment in the hospitality sector is salaried, more than 1.2 million, while there are only 289,000 self-employed, which means a salary rate of 81%, somewhat below the average.
What has changed considerably as a result of the entry into force of the labor reform are the types of contracts that prevail predominantly in this sector, where until now the rate of temporary employment has skyrocketed. However, after the application of the new standard, temporary employment has been significantly reduced and has stood at around the average of 17%.
On the contrary, those employed with an indefinite employment relationship have skyrocketed, 20% more in this first quarter than a year ago, and there are now more than one million workers who now have a stable contract, 83% of the total. However, it should be noted that the boom in discontinuous permanent contracts has had a strong impact on this sector and has reached maximums: more than 131,000 are in this situation of intermittent work, almost 13% of the permanent ones.
The Randstad report indicates that the aging of the sector is a fact, since the age group between 45 and 54 years of age is gaining more and more weight in total employment in the sector and for several quarters has exceeded the group of 35 to 44 years. The youngest represent only 12% of the total employment in the sector, although the group that registers the most loss is between those between 35 and 44 years of age.
“The unattractiveness of the sector for the younger generations, especially in food and beverage services, with losses of 4.7%, accentuates the generational problem,” says the study.
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