Brussels not only knows that Spain’s socialist government effectively falsifies unemployment numbers, but it willingly goes along and keeps financing the farce.
The European Commission admitted that the mostly inactive seasonal workers are not registered as unemployed in Spain, positively skewing the official statistics, El Debate wrote on Sunday, September 10th.
The information came out after Spanish conservative MEP Jorge Buxadé (ECR) asked the Commission to evaluate the Pedro Sanchez-led government’s past achievements in the area, in particular after Brussels allocated billions of euros to help Spain tackle the unemployment problem—seemingly to no avail.
Furthermore, Buxadé drew attention to the Spanish government manipulating the unemployment data. The “official figure should—but does not—include the ‘permanent seasonal workers’ who, thanks to socialist-communist labor reforms, can be counted as employees even if they work one day a month,” the MEP wrote, calling the practice a “sham.”
In his written response, Employment Commissioner Nicolas Schmidt recognized that the Spanish youth unemployment rate is officially the highest in the EU (22.4%, or double the bloc’s average of 11.3%), but noted that the trend slightly improved last year (by 4.6%) and said that the Commission deems certain measures financed through the EU-allocated pandemic recovery funds “satisfactorily fulfilled.”
However, Schmidt did admit that the Spanish government does indeed underreport unemployment in the country. The commissioner confirmed both that seasonal workers in Spain could qualify as unemployed under international standards, and that Spanish law doesn’t recognize them as such, despite their inclusion.
“Permanent seasonal workers may be reported to be unemployed if they meet [the International Labor Organization’s] definition during their periods of inactivity,” Schmidt admitted. “However, on account of their employment contract being in force, Spain has so far not included them in its national registered unemployment.”
Half a million non-jobs
Spain introduced its labor market reform package in January and was given €140 billion from the EU recovery funds to finance the transition. One of the main goals of the reforms was to lower the rate of people employed by temporary contracts—which stood at 22% before the pandemic—and create more permanent jobs.
In July, six months after the rollout, Prime Minister Sanchez boasted about the success of his initiative by announcing that unemployment was slowly falling every consecutive month and that there were 740,000 more people with permanent contracts than before the pandemic.
However, according to Buxadé and other members of the conservative opposition party, VOX, the ‘success’ of the reforms is largely due to a few changed definitions and a new type of employment contract.
Whereas seasonal workers previously had temporary contracts and counted as unemployed when out of work, now they have “permanent temporary contracts” (or “discontinuous fixed contracts”), which stay active all year long, even though they still technically work only a few months each year.
According to the Spanish trade union USO, over 60% of the ‘permanent’ contracts signed in June were, in fact, this new type of temporary contract. “The permanent discontinuous contracts are the new temporary contracts … completely perverting” the figures, said USO’s secretary-general Joaquín Pérez.
Commissioner Schmidt’s comment, therefore, only confirmed what everybody in Spain knew already. The only novelty, perhaps, is that Brussels is completely aware of the false statistics, but—unsurprisingly enough—plays along with Sanchez’s farce and celebrates the “successful reforms.”
