The volume of temporary workers has been significantly reduced in Spain after the entry into force of the labor reform. The temporary employment rate marked a new low at the end of 2023, falling below 17% for the first time, as reflected in the latest data from the Active Population Survey (EPA) released this Friday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). ). However, while temporary contracts are reduced, shorter employment relationships are also gaining weight.. One in three temporary contracts signed in 2023 lasted less than a week.
According to the details of the contract statistics of the State Public Employment Service (SEPE), in 2023, 8,823,222 temporary contracts were signed, 21.8% less than in 2022 and the lowest volume of the series accumulated in the whole of a anus. They represented 57.13% of the total of 15,444,205 labor agreements signed throughout the year, 15.65% less than the previous year.. This decline in hiring is a reflection of the decline of temporary employment, compared to the heyday of permanent employment.
Spain has 2,974,400 workers with temporary contracts, the lowest figure in the historical series, even despite record employment levels.. According to EPA data, in the last year, between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the same period of 2023, 783,000 jobs have been created, an increase that has allowed us to overcome the barrier of 21 million employed people.. Never before have there been so many people working in Spain and, at the same time, never before have there been so few with a temporary contract. The number of employees with an employment relationship for a certain period of time was reduced last year by 140,300 people, which caused the temporary employment rate to fall to 16.49%, its lowest level in historical series.
Only one in six workers in Spain has a temporary contract, although the rate shoots up to 29.6% in the public sector – driven especially by hiring habits in Health and Education -, compared to the minimum of 13.2%. registered in private company. “The labor reform that we have promoted through social dialogue is managing to put an end to abusive and unjustified hiring,” said the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, this Friday, recalling the purpose of stimulating permanent hiring that motivated the regulatory change.
The labor reform, which came into full force in April 2022 after a period of three months to apply the modifications, eliminated the work and service contract, which was one of the most used.. Before the legal change was adopted, this extinct formula represented more than a third of the 1,681,550 contracts signed in December 2021, only surpassed by the figure of the eventual one due to production circumstances. The disappearance of this type of contract produced the transfer of temporary workers to permanent workers throughout 2022, with a special growth in permanent-discontinuous workers.
40.53 days on average
However, beyond reducing the volume of contracts, the legal reform has also had as a collateral effect a shortening of the duration of temporary employment relationships, since the extinct contracts for work and service used to be longer than the temporary ones due to circumstance. of production, now predominant alone among the temporary. According to SEPE data, in December 2021, the average duration of contracts for work and services was 65.3 days, compared to the average of 35.97 days for eventual contracts due to production circumstances, which represented the 47.5% of contracts signed.
When observing all types, the average duration of temporary contracts in the last month of December before the entry into force of the labor reform was 45.62 days. Two years later, this figure has been reduced to 40.53 days in 2023, 7.21% below the 43.68 days in which the average was at the end of 2022.
Specifically, contracts of less than seven days gained weight last year, despite reducing their volume by 12% compared to 2022.. 3,184,240 labor agreements of these characteristics were signed, which represented a third of the total temporary contracts signed throughout the year. 79.75% were concentrated in the services sector, where 212,062 contracts of this type were signed, followed far behind by the 31,329 signed in industry and the 20,541 in agriculture.. In 2023, 1,601,105 contracts were also signed for between one and three months and 1,117,554 for between fifteen days and one month.
Contracts due to production circumstances were the most used among the temporary modalities, with 6.5 million signatures. This formula has a maximum legal duration of six months – extendable to twelve by collective agreement – to cover unforeseen situations and 90 days if they are foreseeable.. In this second case, a duration of less than 30 days is penalized with an additional contribution.. In the replacement modality, the labor reform reduced the duration of the chain of contracts necessary to consider a permanent person from 24 months in a period of 30 months to 18 in a period of 24.
Impact on permanent employees
Regarding indefinite contracts, their duration at the time of signing is evidently indeterminate.. However, a recent study by the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) suggests that the labor reform has not improved the duration of permanent contracts either, given that, although this formula has been encouraged, no longer hiring patterns are observed. stable over time. Economists José Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, Manu García, Luis Puch and Jesús Ruiz base this conclusion on the fact that employment data maintain the three usual patterns of job creation and destruction: hiring is done on Monday and fired on Friday, hire only for the weekend or hire on the first day of the month to fire on the last day.
“The situation prior to the reform is almost exactly replicated in terms of job stability for workers,” says the report, in which they maintain that the temporary employment rate “is surely not the best tool” to measure job insecurity.. “We must look for other ways to measure precariousness that are not based only on the structure by type of contract, but also take into account other variables and in particular the real duration of the contracts,” they say.