Employment continues to resist in an adverse climate but is already exhibiting clear symptoms of exhaustion in this final stretch of the year. Social Security once again added members in October despite an economic environment of strong uncertainty, with not one but two wars, inflation that continues to moderate and rates that rise and suffocate the economy of many homes and companies. But it does so in a much weaker way and thanks, mainly, to a historic increase in the education sector, while the unemployment recorded this time has not managed to challenge tradition and is growing again by nearly 37,000 people, contrary to what which occurred unexpectedly in the last two years.
October is usually a month in which jobs are created and this has happened this year, although in a much less intense way than the previous eight years. Specifically, 92,862 jobs were added on average in original terms, the worst figure since 2015, and practically all of them occupied by women. The system once again surpasses the barrier of 20.8 million contributors that it surpassed for the first time last May and lost at the end of August, with a new record of affiliates, which now exceed 9.8 million and represent 47% of the total, according to the data published this Friday by the Ministry of Social Security.
The pace of job creation thus slows down slightly and stands at an interannual rate of 2.6%, only one tenth less than in September and four tenths compared to last year and well above the increase in GDP. In the last year, more than 533,000 jobs have been generated, a not insignificant figure but lower than the almost 600,000 a year ago or the 700,000 in 2021.
55,000 more teachers
Education has been the true architect of this new boost in the labor market as a result of the start of the school year. What’s more, it has registered a historic increase by adding more than 195,000 workers in October alone, who have managed to compensate for the destruction that has been recorded in many other branches, mainly in healthcare and hospitality.
Although it is common for affiliation in education to grow strongly in the months of September, October and November to recover the strong losses suffered between June and August, what is unusual is that, for the first time, they have been created in the last two months many more positions than those that evaporated with the summer holidays. Specifically, in September and October more than 284,000 contributors joined this sector, while in the summer almost 230,000 were lost. This means that the school year has started with 55,000 more teachers than it ended, without a clear reason for this.
The Ministry of Social Security explained to this newspaper that for the most part it is due to the fact that there has been a statistical transfer of public education workers who in some autonomous communities were included in the Public Administration heading, which this month has lost 36,000 personnel. , but still the gap is still too big.
What is evident is that this sector suffers from a high seasonality: it destroys employment on vacation to hire again in the fall, something that the labor reform has not managed to eliminate. The new rule has suddenly reduced the temporary employment of the private sector to around 14%, but it is not having an impact at all on the public sector, where 30% of its employees are temporary, that is, double that of companies. .
Permanent workers, at maximum
And while education is being strongly promoted, the other large public sector, health, has lost 43,000 workers in the last two months, in the midst of the vaccination campaign and in the face of the arrival of bad weather, which is usually conducive to the proliferation of diseases. respiratory.
On the other side of the coin, once again the boost in employment is not enough and the number of registered unemployed rose, for the third consecutive month, by 36,936 people, bringing the total number of unemployed to 2,759,404. 155,488 less than a year ago and the lowest figure this month since 2007. It should be noted, however, that permanent discontinuous workers are not included here even if they are inactive, a group that could increase the number of effectively unemployed to exceed the 3.3 million, when adding those employed in the hospitality industry who become inactive.
The total number of contracts registered during the month of October was close to 1.4 million, of which more than 608,700 were of an indefinite nature, which represents 43.59% of all contracts. The Ministry of Social Security highlighted that the percentage of members with an indefinite contract stood at 87% in October, its historical maximum, growing 17 points since the labor reform.
More than a million workers are permanent discontinuous workers
Almost two years after the labor reform came into force, the Government still has not revealed the statistics it promised about how many discontinued permanent workers are without work each month. What is known is that, today, there are more than one million members who have this type of intermittent contract due to the seasonality of their activity, which represents 5% of all employed people, according to data from the Ministry of Social Security.
The Executive removes this controversy and highlights that the objective of the labor reform, which was to bring temporary workers to a more stable regulatory framework, such as that of discontinuous permanent workers, has been achieved.
In addition, Labor revealed this Friday that throughout this year 55,000 false self-employed workers have been transformed into permanent workers thanks to the work of the Inspection. The Ministry defends that there is, therefore, no widespread fraud surrounding this contract, but rather that it is used for what “really should be used.”