Permanent contracts continue to rise and eight out of ten employed persons are permanent
three months after Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine and almost a year after the CPI began its escalation, the Spanish labor market continues to be launched. Spain added in May its fourth consecutive month with rising employment, it was its best May in the last four years and comfortably consolidates the share of 20 million active workers. The imminent tourist season blows in favor and the rest of the uncertainties do not slow down, for now, the progress of the Spanish labor market, according to data published this Thursday by the Ministries of Social Security and Labor. What has allowed that, due to wear and tear and after several months of ‘green numbers’, the unemployment has dropped below three million people. Something that hasn’t happened since 2008when the brick crisis broke out.
Despite the fact that international organizations and the Government itself have had to lower their growth forecasts for the GDP due to the unexpectedly long inflation and the war in Ukraine, for the moment this lowering of expectations is not reflected in the employment data. The question remains as to whether said reduction will arrive late – it would not be the first time that hiring is one step behind – or it simply will not arrive and the resilience of the Spanish labor market will withstand the downpour.
At the moment, what the statistics show is that this May closed with almost 100,000 fewer people registered with the SEPE, leaving the total number of unemployed at 2.92 million people. This is a very high figure, one of the highest in the entire European Union and four out of every 10 of those unemployed They do not receive any benefit or subsidy from the SEPE, but symbolically they have managed to break the threshold of three million unemployed. We must go back to the outbreak of the housing bubble and the collapse of Lehman Brothers to find a date on which there would not be an even number of unemployed in Spain.
The road has been long, because from that social and economic catastrophe, unemployment went on and on while the protests and the closure of companies resonated, until reaching in 2013 the five million unemployed in all Spain. It has taken 12 years to recover, showing that the Spanish labor market is much more efficient in rehiring people who alternate months of unemployment and employment or attracting workers from abroad than recovering a significant number of people who lost their jobs 12 years ago and since then he has not been able to return to work.
However, this milestone of falling below three million unemployed hides a certain unfavorable bias towards women. Well, unemployment has dropped substantially more among them than among them and although the mens they have returned to 2008 levels, the women they are still in 2009.
The hotel industry recovers employment
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The hostelry This May, it has recovered the employment levels it had before the pandemic. It was the last major sector that still had fewer employees than in 2019 and after the pull of recent months, you can now say that the coronavirus crisis has been left behind. The summer campaign is approaching, good weather, zero restrictions despite the uptick in covid cases and part of the stagnant savings from past years that still drives many households to the bar or restaurant.
There are only two large branches of activity that employ fewer people than two years ago. On the one hand, there is the banking, immersed in a generalized process of you are to save labor costs and adapt to technological changes. And, on the other, the domestic workers, many of them were fired when the first confinement was decreed and have not been hired again in many of the homes where they operated. More people work in the rest of the unions than before the covid and this explains why Spain has consolidated the level of 20 million Social Security affiliates. Never before have there been so many people working at the same time in the country and the question remains whether it will be able to retain that level after the winter months, traditionally less effusive in terms of employment.