Long-term unemployment becomes chronic after pandemic: 1.5 million affected

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Spain gathers more people unemployed for more than two years than 17 countries combined, concentrating 30% of the total in Europe

The labor market has reached at least three historic milestones in the past quarter. The first was reached at the end of April, when Social Security exceeded 20 million members for the first time. In May, the threshold of three million unemployed was lowered after 13 years in a row without reaching it. And June became the month with the most permanent contracts of all time: almost 800,000, giving almost 80% of current employees a permanent job.

And all this in a context of economic crisis caused by the war in Ukraine and high inflation. Therefore, we speak with some surprise about the resilience of employment, as all the ups and downs in the economy so far have had a rapid impact on the labor market, which is now resisting.

However, there is one fact that has been far from improving in the past two years. At the same time, unemployment is falling significantly, paradoxically, long-term unemployment is rising alarmingly, that of more than a year, and more rapidly that of more than four years of uninterrupted job search without success. To the point that it can be said to have become chronic after the pandemic.

There are currently more than 3.1 million people in Spain who want to work and who cannot, 1.5 million of whom have been in this situation for more than a year, according to data from the Active Population Survey (a higher number than the given by the Ministry because not all unemployed are registered). That is almost 130,000 more than before the outbreak of Covid-19 and it also means that almost half of the unemployed are long-term unemployed (47.4%).

And not only that: Spain has now chained more than a million long-term unemployed for 13 years, which means that it is the great Achilles heel of our labor market, the so-called structural unemployment, which since this time has seen two great moments of job creation (the 2014-2019 period after the financial crisis and the 2021-2022 period after the pandemic) and this group, however, has not been able to reintegrate. They have forgotten the great one.

“The labor reform aimed at curtailing temporary employment, the ERTE and the SMI (‘insiders’ of the labor market), but has partly ignored the ‘outsiders’ (unemployed), especially the long-term ones,” it said. regrets Alejandro Costanzo, director of the technical cabinet of Asempleo, the employers’ organization for temporary work.

In this case, time is dangerous against us: the longer a person remains unemployed, the harder it will be for them to find a job, and the pandemic meant a long year of paralysis from which it was difficult to recover. For example, an unemployed person who had been unemployed for less than a year was nearly three times more likely to find a job than someone who had been unemployed for more than a year, according to data from Asempleo.

In turn, long-term unemployment works against social protection, which decreases with the passing of the months, and even after two years the unemployment benefit expires. And that in the best case. 35% of the unemployed, well over a million, are not receiving help, either because they have exhausted their entitlement to benefits or because they have not contributed enough, CC OO data from late 2021 shows.

And it’s not surprising when you take into account that nearly a million people have been hunting for an impossible job for two years, 57,000 more than in 2020. And even the search time exceeds the four years for 628,000, or whatever it’s the same, for one in five unemployed. This group – which has seen three consecutive quarters of increases for the first time since 2014 – is mainly made up of older workers and people, regardless of age, with low qualifications, according to a report by Adecco.

For example, Spain is no longer just the European country with the highest unemployment rate – double the community average – but it is also at the top of long-term unemployment. To the point that 30% of all unemployed people in Europe who have been looking for a job for more than two years live here. In absolute terms, Spain alone has as many very long-term unemployed as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Netherlands, Austria, Romania, Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia and Lithuania. That is, as many as 17 countries together.

The most common profile of unemployed over four years of age is that of a woman, elderly and without education. Because two in three very long-term unemployed are women, more than 400,000, of whom almost 300,000 are over 50 years old. This is also because the ability to get out of unemployment is inversely proportional to age; In other words, older people are more likely to remain unemployed for more than 12 months in a row.

And that goes for training too. If the unemployment rate is currently 13.6%, it doubles to more than 26% for those with no education, while it halves for university students, where only 7.7% cannot find work.

That is why education is the great weapon in the fight against unemployment. And only 40% of today’s unemployed have or have access to an education. This is the great ongoing challenge.

Source: La Verdad

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