2023-09-26 23:08:12
Discontinuous permanent contracts have become the panacea of Yolanda Díaz’s labor reform to drastically reduce temporary employment, although experts and analysts point out that the effect is more statistical than real. Its exponential growth has caused paradoxes in hiring, which call into question its real capacity to increase the numbers of permanent employees, especially when the number of hours worked has fallen drastically in the first semester, which has caused employment to grow more than the hours worked.
Thus, almost 58% of the permanent contracts signed until July were part-time or permanent discontinuous, but the “summer effect” caused that between July and August the number of permanent discontinuous contracts now exceeds that of permanent full-time contracts. Furthermore, since the entry into force of the labor reform, 577,000 people signed more than one permanent contract in the same month, when in 2021 – before the reform – there were barely 26,000.
These are data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) analyzed by Randstad in the latest edition of its labor and employment report, which highlights that the discontinuous permanent employees registered as job seekers also skyrocketed after the approval of the new legislation and now exceed the 659,000 workers in the SEPE. Between March 2022 and July 2023, 3.63 million discontinuous permanent contracts have been signed but, in that period, the number of workers registered with Social Security with said contract has only increased by 454,000 people.
According to their calculations, the number of effectively unemployed reaches 3.34 million, which means that 112,000 people are effectively unemployed compared to a year ago. All this boost in employment has meant that, for the first time, the number of employed people has exceeded 21.06 million employed people in the second quarter of 2023, a growth that translates into an increase of 604,000 contributors between April and June. However, if we compare these data in year-on-year terms, we see that although there has been a growth of 589,000 people –almost exclusively in the section of permanent employees–, 12 months earlier that figure rose to 796,000 jobs created, 207,000 less. Regarding the temporary employment rate, the report highlights that that of the public sector rises to 31.1%, more than double that of the private sector (13.9%) for the seventeenth consecutive quarter, a difference between the two that marks a historical record.
The hospitality industry (90,300 jobs), land transport (71,800) and retail trade (70,500) have been the sectors that have created the most jobs in the last year, while the greatest losses were recorded in agriculture – with 40,500 jobs lost. manufacturing of metal products (28,000) and artistic activities (25,500). The decrease in unemployment by 365,000 people in the second quarter has brought the number of registered unemployed to 2.76 million and the unemployment rate to 11.6%.
Likewise, Randstad experts recall that only 36.8% of the unemployed have university or vocational training, a proportion that has increased eight tenths in the last year. On the contrary, the unemployment rate of workers with university studies and higher vocational training (6.6%) fell 1.1 points in the last quarter and remains the only one below the average unemployment rate. That is, having higher education entails activity rates 20 points higher than the rest, well below the average unemployment rate (11.6%). Three out of every 10 employed people (29.3%) have a low level of qualification – Secondary or Compulsory –, a proportion that almost doubles the EU average. Almost 1.12 million unemployed people (40.4% of the total) had been searching for work for more than a year in the second quarter, 280,000 less than a year ago.
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