Yesterday the National Statistics Institute published some chilling jobs data after completing the latest Survey of Active Workers (EPA following the Spanish abbreviation): 5,273,600 active Spanish workers were without jobs at the end of 2011, which means the unemployment rate was 22.85%. This situation was expected and underscores the urgency with which the Government is currently undertaking deep reforms to the country's labor market. Simultaneously, Spain is looking ahead to a long recession, and experts predict that there will be more than 6 million without jobs by the end of the year.
We are far past the danger zone of 5 million unemployed workers. Today, with a new Prime Minister and Cabinet, the jobs problem is still on the table. Last year Spain cut 600,600 government jobs, a figure that made is break record cuts made during the 2008 crisis when the Spanish government laid off 600,000 employees.
By contrast, 237,800 were let go in 2010. More worrisome still: the total number of homes in which every active worker does not have a job has risen above a million for the first time (1,575,000). This is a seriously disturbing figure that has motivated various representatives from labor sector NGOs to prophesy a "social crack" at some point during the next few years if mechanisms for social protection are not reinforced.
Long-term unemployment among young workers, which is especially disastrous in Spain's traditionally thriving and important service industry, are setting up an extremely complex scenario that requires "deep structural reforms that modernize our economy," said Luis Garicano, professor from the London School of Economics (LSE).
NGO predictions aren?t betting on easy work considering that a recession is on the horizon. As occurred at the beginning of the crisis, temporary jobs are also flagging: out of 350,200 lost jobs, 246,000 correspond to temporary jobs. The rest are full-time contracts, which makes the unemployment rate for temporary jobs 24.98%.
Young worker unemployment
The international community alarmed at the high unemployment rate for our country?s young workers. And rightfully so. The Q4 EPA survey indicates that six out of ten jobs slashed in 2011 were held by workers between 16 and 29 years of age. Of the 600,600 employees that lost jobs last year, 356,600 were this age, and the bulk of them were between 20 and 29 (169,500), which means more than half (59.37%) of all jobs lost across the entire sector last year.
