The data has been late more than a year to be available since the labor reform was approved, but the Ministry of Labor has finally unveiled the mystery: 443,078 workers with a fixed discontinuous contract were inactive at the end of 2022. The data, published by The world, comes from a parliamentary question that the Popular Group sent to the Government and that has now been answered. According to that newspaper, 268,402 of these workers were receiving an unemployment benefit, while another 174,676 workers did not have enough accumulated contributions to receive a benefit.
According to the Social Security records, in December there were 833,648 active workers with a permanent discontinuous contract, so that, if the 443,078 inactive are added, it gives a total of 1.28 million people with a permanent discontinuous contract, of which just over a third (35%) were inactive at the end of the year. These figures fit with the calculations that were made, since the inactive discontinuous permanent workers appear in the statistics of the Ministry of Labor in a mixed bag in which they were added to the workers in temporary employment regulation files (ERTE). Until last year, this type of contract was marginal and irrelevant in macroeconomic terms, but, after the labor reform, it became the way for companies with seasonal activity cycles to make permanent contracts without having to pay a salary every month. of valley.
Javier Jorrin Graphics: Miguel Ángel Gavilanes
By maintaining a current contract, these workers are not counted as unemployed, although it really is as if they were. In fact, when these contracts were temporary, in the campaign of low activity they went directly to unemployment. Hence, it has been considered as a hidden unemployment that did not appear in the statistics, as occurs in other countries with similar contractual modalities. At the end of 2022 there were 2.83 million unemployed, so that, if the 443,078 discontinuous permanent workers in the inactivity phase are added, would increase the number of unemployed by more than 15%.
Now that the Government has managed to refine its statistics to obtain this data, it should be possible to publish it monthly along with the rest of the labor market figures. This is important, since the number of discontinuous permanent workers that do not work varies drastically throughout the year. Most of these contracts are used in companies that have peaks of activity related to the arrival of tourists, from hotels and restaurants to shops and leisure and activity companies. This means that this number it will drop a lot during the spring and summer months and it will rise drastically from September.
In any case, the government It did publish the evolution of the number of active workers with a fixed discontinuous contract in the Social Security affiliation series. This data is the most important, since it shows the contribution to employment of this contractual modality enhanced with the labor reform. The indicator for the inactive serves to reduce the figures for registered unemployment, although this indicator creates many problems when analyzing the evolution of the labor market, since it is highly influenced by the incentives that the unemployed have to sign up at the employment offices. That is, the more aid there is for the unemployed, the more the number of people who sign up will grow regardless of the evolution of the labor market.
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Javier Jorrin
The non-incorporation of discontinuous fixed to the lists of registered unemployment is a methodology that It has not changed after the labor reform. What has changed is the importance of this type of contract: in March of last year, there were just over half a million discontinuous fixed lines and at the end of the year there were already more than 1.2 million, which represents an increase of more than 140 %.
For a worker there are some differences between being unemployed or a discontinuous permanent in inactivity phase. The most important is that the contractual link is maintained, so that you will be re-fished when the activity cycle arrives in your company. The company cannot incorporate another worker to do the same job if it has a discontinuous permanent inactivity. In addition, in the event that the company wants to do without them, they will have the protection of an indefinite worker (including the claim of unfair dismissal) and not that of a temporary one, and, in addition, they will receive more compensation.
From now on, it should be possible to track discontinuous landlines in idle periods every month as it is done with those who are active. It will serve to compare the evolution of this effective unemployment with the official registered unemployment statistics and thus compare whether the labor reform had effects when it came to stabilizing employment in terms of getting workers to spend more time active than inactive.
The data has been late more than a year to be available since the labor reform was approved, but the Ministry of Labor has finally unveiled the mystery: 443,078 workers with a fixed discontinuous contract were inactive at the end of 2022. The data, published by The world, comes from a parliamentary question that the Popular Group sent to the Government and that has now been answered. According to that newspaper, 268,402 of these workers were receiving an unemployment benefit, while another 174,676 workers did not have enough accumulated contributions to receive a benefit.
