Labor Department number two Joaquín Pérez Rey, Minister Yolanda Díaz’s right-hand man, met with employers and unions yesterday to make an initial analysis of the problem identified by numerous companies that are unable to find workers, cutting almost 110,000 jobs occupy those who have not found employees. This is the official number of vacancies, but recruitment companies such as Adecco increase the volume of these vacancies to 9% of corporate vacancies in Spain.
After yesterday’s meeting, participants agreed that the problem of labor shortages in the Spanish market is nowhere near as serious as that of the United States, where the phenomenon known as the Great Resignation or Great Resignation has caused more than four million workers to lose their jobs leaving.
However, once this finding was made, the Secretary of State for Employment, Pérez Rey, also announced that a first analysis of this problem in Spain points to other causes than those in the United States for the labor shortage and narrowed down the problem to certain sectors, in which “they don’t pay enough, the necessary working conditions are not met”. Unlike layoffs in the US, where workers use money saved from the pandemic or public aid to quit their jobs – which aren’t the highest-paying either – in Spain there are companies that, no matter how hard they look, find them no employees. Thus, Pérez Rey specified yesterday that “some of the vacancies that appear in certain areas and in the hospitality sector have to do with the fact that they do not pay enough, there are no breaks, the days are tiring and workers do not enjoy their private lives and be able to combine professionally”.
To this, the Secretary of State added the problem of housing prices, especially in tourist areas where the average rent is 1,400 euros and workers have to pay for it during the season.
localized phenomenon
According to this analysis, there is no general problem with job vacancies, but rather a local phenomenon in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, transport or construction. Against this background, the idea of those responsible at the Ministry of Labor is to convene the social officers again within two weeks to take action in this regard. But for now, the government’s first prescription, according to yesterday’s analysis, is for companies to pay more and improve the terms of their offers.
In fact, among the possible solutions, the participants of yesterday’s meeting named the intensification of the Ministry of Labor’s inspection activity on the working conditions of vacancies, going beyond specific campaigns such as the fight against fraud in interrupted fixed-term and fixed-term employment contracts. The inspection plans to start this Thursday with the sending of hundreds of letters to businesses to begin.
However, other experts in the sector also point to other reasons for the labor shortage in Spain, which were not identified after yesterday’s meeting. Specifically, the lack of training that companies demand, especially for skilled jobs in manufacturing and telecommunications, for example. Although Pérez Rey mentioned that part of the current vacancies are in jobs with great technical complexity such as computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality or cybersecurity. In these cases, the solutions must be found through requalification plans.