The start of the high season of the tourist campaign has given a strong boost to the labor market. The number of unemployed registered in the employment offices was reduced last May by 99,512 people, with which the bar falls below three million to 2,922,991, a barrier that was overcome with the serious financial crisis in 2008 and that it had not crossed again in the opposite direction.
At that time, construction was the main pillar of employment, with more than 1.7 million affiliates. Since then, tourism has taken over as the main support for the labor market and the definitive recovery of this activity after two seasons marked by Covid-19 is being the engine of the labor market. All in all, last May, both services and construction, industry or agriculture experienced reductions in their registered unemployment figures.
The improvement in the data is therefore relevant, although it remains below those registered in other years such as 2021 (121,378) or 2017 (111,908), for example. In year-on-year terms, the decline in unemployment is 22% or 858,259 fewer people.
Unemployment among young people under 25 years of age fell by -9.90% compared to the previous month. 730,427 employment contracts of an indefinite nature were registered, representing 44.52% of the total. These contracts were divided, in terms of the duration of their working day, into 291,308 full-time, 174,595 part-time and 264,524 permanent discontinuous.
This type of contracting, that of discontinuous fixed lines, has skyrocketed by multiplying by 13 compared to a year ago. The reason is that they are the substitutes in the new labor framework for the old temporary contracts.
From a legal point of view, they are indefinite, although the worker may spend more time inactive than active and, in statistical terms, workers do not count as unemployed even if they have not gone to work for months. For this reason they are already under the scrutiny of the Labor Inspection for the possibility that under the umbrella of indefinite hiring they contain pockets of precarious hiring or, as Alberto Núñez Feijoo, president of the PP, has summed up this morning, they cover up “indefinite precariousness” .
Regarding Social Security affiliation, it grew in May by 213,643 people on average, a figure in line with that of May 2021 and 2019, closing the month with 20,232,723 employed at the gates of the summer season.
“The dynamism of employment is maintained in May despite the context of uncertainty,” highlights the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security, which also stresses that “the positive effects of the labor reform continue to intensify.”
In seasonally adjusted figures, the increase in affiliation is 33,366 people in the last month and means adding 185,987 workers since the end of 2021.
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