The lack of transparency with permanent interruptions calls into question the reliability of the unemployment record

On March 30, labor reform entered into force with a clear mission: to put an end to unbridled temporary employment and to promote stability. The idea that inspired this rule was to achieve a paradigm shift that would eventually allow employment to be the exception and stability the rule. To achieve this, measures were taken in two ways: fixed-term contracts were tightened and attention was drawn to intermittent permanent contracts, a formula that had remained until then in the labor market, and which was sought to strengthen with increasing assumptions in which it could be used. No one believed at the time that the conversion from temporary to permanent would raise a wave of criticism and that the unemployment record would be questioned, and even accused the government of “fabricating” the statistics. what happens? At the end of 2022, there were 13.4 million workers on an indefinite contract, of whom 830,000 were permanently laid off. This means that on December 31 there were 2.3 million more members on an indefinite contract than there were in 2021, of which about 450,000 were non-permanent and the rest were full-time and part-time regulars. In just one year, a labor reform, the intermittent contract multiplied by two; Became the new temporary contract. From this growth it can be deduced that the jobs that were seasonal before are still so and that the only thing that has changed is that the type of contract that is given to workers with a seasonal job is now stable. And that in some cases they are permanent, intermittent workers, and are guaranteed to return to work after a period of inactivity. All alarms have gone off with the way the type of work being created is reflected in the statistics, with the way they are calculated. Permanent casual workers are not always employed, they report periods of inactivity during which they may, in some cases, receive unemployment benefit, but they do not appear on unemployment rolls because they are considered job seekers. Therefore, while they are active, they are counted as affiliated with Social Security and when they do not have them, they do not appear as registered, but they do not appear as unemployed. This is the case, for example, in the case of a maid in a hotel in the Balearic Islands or a person hired in a beach tavern. A scenario that has been worrying economists, who have been calling on the government for data transparency for months. The European Central Bank, the Bank of Spain, and organizations such as Fedea and the BBVA research service are all demanding that the CEO detail which employees on intermittent permanent contracts are not working, and they want to know the periods of activity and inactivity and thus dispel existing uncertainties that are being created based on recorded unemployment and employment data. Without doing so they cannot assess the impact of labor reform. The toughest rhetoric comes each month from PP, which accuses the government of “fabricating” unemployment numbers and inflating employment data, the most the Labor Department denies. The department headed by Yolanda Diaz states that the statistical accounting of these contracts has been the same since 1985 and that if intermittent permanent contracts did not appear in unemployment lists before, neither with PP. Their method of computation is identical, but they have increased greatly with the reform of the work; Their importance is much greater and this forces us to classify the conditions of these workers in order to ward off the specter of make-up, which casts doubt on the reliability of the results. The European Central Bank’s vice president, Luis de Guindos, acknowledged last month that its calculation method had not changed, but called for more accurate data, as did the Bank of Spain’s director of economics and statistics, Angel Gavilan. “Now that the situation has changed and these contracts are starting to matter, it will be convenient for us to be able to distinguish between job seekers and non-job seekers, which will allow us to better clean up the chain that we use in our models.” This will dispel “any noise in the data,” he said. “. More info Not ongoing: 2.3 million contracts The government doesn’t know if active BBVA Research and Fedea, which was the first research service to notify of the stat change, already warned last October that there would be more than 160,000 unemployed Those who are officially counted if those who are hired as non-continuous and inactive permanent workers are added.