The new labor reform has reduced the number of job insecurity among young people and highlights the difficult situation they are in and many of them still live in
«You will live worse than your parents», «if you make an effort, you can achieve everything you want», «what you need is training», «what you need is entrepreneurship», «we are in crisis», «we are once again in a crisis», «you are from the generation of the two crises», «you are the crystal generation», «when you start it is normal to earn little», «they don’t get paid, but they give you experience”, “the day is over”, “we are looking for someone who can do a little bit of everything”, “the best thing is to be your own boss”, “the contract is for three months”, “the job for life no longer exists”, “here you know what time you enter, but not what time you leave”, “in twenty years we don’t know what jobs there will be”, “you have to adapt to change”, “because there is a director in my company”, “tomorrow you have to come with a skirt”, “if you can’t support them, don’t have children”, “at least in your parent’s house you save”, “now the video curriculum is in de vogue”, “sign up for Chinese”, “I don’t know if there will be pensions”, “you should go to the psychologist”, “ig Maybe my uncle can hire you in his company”, “everything will be fine” …
With these sentences we started the most recent report on youth and employment that we have prepared from the Reina Sofía Center on Adolescence and Youth of FAD: X-ray of Youth (un)employment in Spain 2007-2022. They all refer to a reality, some messages and some broken promises that most young people face in their daily lives.
The problem of youth unemployment and insecurity has become a challenge that continues to burden society. Throughout the report, we analyze in detail the following issues: the employability and unemployment of young people from the 2008 crisis to the present, the characteristics and working conditions of youth employment, the structural factors that leave young people in a vulnerable position, the impact of the pandemic on the labor market and some reflections on the future of youth employment.
The structural problem of youth employment has become entrenched in Spain in recent decades, but the last 15 years have been particularly disastrous. Two of the indicators that best reflect the state of affairs are the unemployment rate and the temp rate:
1. The unemployment rate for young people aged 16 to 29 analyzed in three age groups shows that in 2008 (second quarter figures, EPA-INE) it was 41% for the group aged 16 to 19; for the group aged 20 to 24 this was 18.5% and for the group aged 25 to 29 it was 11.7%.
All these percentages increased dramatically in the early years of the 2008 crisis, especially for the younger age group. In 2013, an alarming 73% of unemployment was recorded in the 16 to 19 age group, 53.6% among those aged 20 to 24 and 33.7% among those aged 25 to 29.
In the following years, a gradual improvement was observed (excluding the data for 2020 with the Covid-19 crisis) to 46.4% unemployment for the youngest in the first quarter of 2022, 26.7% for the middle group and 18 .3% for the older youth; still a long way from the overall unemployment rate of 13.6%. As we can see, despite the relative improvement of recent years, we have not yet reached levels lower than pre-crisis levels in 2008.
2. Concerning the temp rate: in the past 25 years, between 69% (2009) and 93% (2014) of young people aged 16-19 who were employed were temporary. The temporary employment figures for young people between the ages of 20 and 24 are somewhat lower, at between 50% (2009) and 74% (2016); and between 36.9% (2009) and 49.8% (2017) of young people aged 25 to 29.
Agency work figures for young people that double, even triple, the agency work of the total population. In the periods with the greatest impact of the 2008 and Covid-19 crises (2013 and 2020), the temporary employment rate fell slightly for the 25-29 age group. However, this does not indicate an improvement in conditions, but rather the effect of the massive destruction of employment, which mainly affects temporary contracts.
The way labor markets in Spain are regulated is one of the main reasons that led to the situation we find ourselves in today. Employment policies in recent decades have largely adopted the values of the neoliberal socio-economic context in which we live, exacerbating the discourses of individual responsibility and meritocracy that have the figure of the entrepreneur as one of its maxims.
The mantra that innovation, effort, self-sufficiency, adaptability and self-management are the best ways to promote employment has permeated government policies based more on the logic of the “activation” of the workforce than on countering the effects of inequality and try to create decent jobs for the entire population.
In this way, the responsibility for unemployment and insecurity has shifted from a collective framework and state protection guarantees to an individual framework, weakening the figure of the collective worker, dualizing the labor market (security versus uncertainty) and generating high levels of frustration and stress in the workplace .
In the case of young people, as they are the last people to enter the labor market, they do not enjoy the protection associated with seniority and because of the type of economic sectors they usually have access to (mainly commerce and hospitality), they are in a position of particular vulnerability in the face of flexibility, assuming that intermittency is an inherent condition of work.
The latest labor reform, approved in December 2021, changes the recipe for the first time in decades that a more flexible labor market means higher and better employment. Tendering for an indefinite period has been promoted by changing the contract formulas and in particular by abolishing the contracting of works and services and limiting the conditions for temporary contracts.
While there are elements of the reform that can be called into question, and its impact in the medium and long term (particularly in the context of the current uncertainty) remains to be assessed, the first changes are very far-reaching: in the second quarter of By 2022 the temporary employment rate for young people aged between 16 and 29 has risen to 47.18% and the unemployment rate to 20.45%, the lowest in more than a decade.
The data thus becomes the best argument for dismantling the idealization of flexibility in the labor market as a solution to unemployment.
This article was published by ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
