© Archyde.com / Gustau Nacarino
Workers at the SEAT factory assemble a car in Martorell, near Barcelona
April 4 (Archyde.com) – Spain’s labor market withstood inflation and a truckers’ strike in March and saw a drop in the number of unemployed, according to data published on Monday, thanks in part to reforms aimed at reducing the use of contracts. temporary.
The number of people registered as unemployed in Spain fell by 0.09% in March compared to February, that is, by 2,921 people, leaving 3.11 million people without work, according to data from the Spanish Ministry of Labor.
Spain added 23,998 net jobs during the month, 0.12% more than in February.
The number of Social Security affiliates, in seasonally adjusted terms, reached 19.96 million people, the highest in the historical series, after eleven months of consecutive growth, the Social Security Ministry said in another report.
Spain has long had high unemployment, largely due to the ease with which employers can lay off staff in a market where nearly a quarter of jobs are held on temporary contracts. February’s unemployment rate of 12.6% was still the highest in the European Union, according to Eurostat.
In December, the Government approved a labor reform as part of the commitments adopted to receive funds from the European Union for the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which limits the legal use of temporary contracts and promotes employment protection plans, such as temporary dismissal plans, to avoid permanent dismissals.
In March, 1.7 million new employment contracts were signed in Spain, of which a third were indefinite, which represents an increase of 148% compared to March 2021, according to data from the Ministry of Labor.
“Despite the difficult times in which we find ourselves, unemployment in March has been reduced by 2,921 people and we reached the highest number of permanent contracts in the historical series,” tweeted the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz.
“Since December, the percentage of indefinite contracts over the total number of contracts has tripled.”
Consumer prices soared 9.8% in March in Spain, boosted by energy and unprocessed food, after the country suffered two weeks of strikes in the transport sector that paralyzed factories and emptied of some products supermarket shelves.
(Reporting by Belén Carreño and Joao Manuel Mauricio in Gdansk; editing by Andrei Khalip and Jan Harvey; translated by Tomás Cobos and Flora Gómez)