He Ministry of Labor denies that Spain has a problem of job vacancies impossible to cover and, consequently, does not see the need to make the requirements more flexible to allow foreigners to join the labor market in Spain, as proposed by the Minister of Social Security, José Luis Escrivá and demand CEOE. “We understand that the difficulties in some sectors and in some territories are not attributable to the existence of a lack of personnel to work, but to the very bad working conditions that are offered,” they maintain in Labor, with arguments similar to those that in their day US President Joe Biden used in his famous ‘pay them more’ (“pay them more”).
The data of the quarterly labor cost survey (ETCL) published quarterly by the National Statistics Institute (INE) give as a result that in Spain there are close to 141,000 jobs. This figure barely represents 0.9% of employment in Spain, the lowest rate in the European Union, and this leads the representatives of the Ministry of Labor to deny that there is a problem in the country for the coverage of vacancies, against of the difficulties that employers allege to fill the positions they offer in sectors such as the hotel industry or the construction, among other sectors. The truth is also that this figure of 141,000 vacancies is much higher than the one that existed before the pandemic (below 100,000) and almost doubles the 74,000 in the second quarter of 2020. In addition, the figure of 140,000 jobs without covering comes to represent almost 40% of the employment created in the last year.
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The arguments of Work collide with the difficulties that the social security minister, José Luis Escrivá, who has shown himself willing to make the regularization of undocumented immigrants that, after two years in Spain, they carry out training that allows their inclusion in the labor market. If, as the Ministry of Labor defends, there is no vacancy problem, there would be no need for extraordinary regularization either.
They add in Labor that, if there really is a problem of covering vacancies for certain tasks or in certain geographies, this should indeed be reflected in the catalog of occupations that are difficult to cover that can be attended by hiring foreign workers at source, after discussion. in social dialogue.