The double side of the employment record: the industry loses 64,500 workers in three months while the hospitality industry gains 271,000

For the first time in Spain there are more than 21 million workers, a record number registered in the second quarter of 2023 thanks to the creation of more than 600,000 jobs between April and June. Never before have so many new employees been added in a single quarter. However, not all sectors have experienced this boom in employment. The most affected in the last three months has been the industry, which has lost 64,500 jobs, compared to the sum of about 271,000 new workers in the hospitality industry.

Since employment collapsed in the second quarter of 2020 with the outbreak of covid-19, Spain has added 2.45 million employed people in three years, according to data from the Active Population Survey (EPA) published this Thursday by the National Statistics Institute (INE). The highlight to date has been the creation of 603,900 jobs between April and June, an unprecedented quarterly rise. In the last year, Spain has gained 588,700 workers.

The services sector, which concentrates 77% of all employees, has experienced even greater prosperity, having added 606,000 new jobs in the second quarter of the year compared to the first three months of the year and 658,000 compared to the second quarter of 2022.. In other words, the creation of employment in the service sector exceeds the general calculation, so that it compensates for the drop in employment in other sectors, especially in industry.

Faced with the record increase in employment in the services sector, the industry has lost 64,500 workers in the last quarter, concentrating a total of 2.73 million employees, half a million less than in 2008. This sector accumulates three quarters with declines in the level of employment and in the last year it has destroyed 50,500 jobs. “Spain is not a country with a high percentage of industry participation in the productive fabric”, clarifies Javier Blasco, director of The Adecco Group Institute, who recalls that European industry as a whole has been directly affected by the energy crisis stemming from the Ukrainian war. “A very important part of our industrial activity depends on the foreign sector, while the service sector is created and developed here, just like agriculture or construction,” he explains.

Specifically, within the industrial sector, the greatest loss of workers has been concentrated in the manufacturing industry, which is currently the second largest branch of activity in terms of number of employees and employs 2.48 million people, after having lost 53,000 workers. in the last quarter and 22,600 in the last year. This annual fall is only exceeded by the evolution of agriculture, which is dedicated to 749,700 people in Spain. In this sector, 39,600 jobs have been destroyed in the last year, despite having recovered 1,500 positions in the last three months.

The push of the hospitality industry

This destruction of employment in agriculture and, especially, in industry contrasts with the behavior of the service sector, which is at historical employment records. Specifically, the hospitality industry has concentrated 44.86% of the new jobs in the second quarter, which has meant the incorporation of 270,900 workers into a sector that employs a total of 1.83 million people. They are followed by commerce —the activity that employs the most workers in Spain, a total of 3.08 million— which has created 111,800 jobs in the last year. Within the services sector, the only branch that has lost workers compared to the second quarter of last year is education, a branch in which 5,300 jobs have been destroyed in the last year and 43,900 in the last quarter, given the associated seasonal component. to the school period.

More timidly than the service sector, employment is also advancing in construction, which has gained 20,800 workers in the last year to reach a total of 1.23 million. This sector, whose puncture greatly increased the unemployment figures during the 2008 crisis, has been in progressive recovery for almost a decade, since employment hit bottom in the first quarter of 2014. At that time, it fell below 950,000 employees, far from the close to 3 million that it touched during the housing bubble.

Disparate working conditions

Paradoxically, the sector where the most jobs have been destroyed in the last year is the one with the lowest temporary employment rate and the highest salaries.. According to the INE, 8% of industry workers have temporary contracts, compared to 15.4% in the service sector. Similarly, the greater stability of the industry is reflected in the duration of the contracts. In this sense, the data from the EPA indicate that 56.6% of people who work in the industrial sector have been in the same job for more than six years, compared to 35.5% of those who work in the hospitality industry. , where one in three workers has been in their job for less than a year.

In addition, employment is not only more stable in the industry, but it is also better paid. According to the INE's annual labor cost survey, the average salary in this sector stands at 29,076 euros per year. In specific industrial branches such as activities related to energy and extractive industries, the average salary rises to 63,074 and 37,251 euros per year respectively. At the opposite extreme, hospitality is the worst-paid activity, with an average salary of 15,176 euros per year, almost 10,000 euros below the average for the service sector as a whole.