These are the contracts that are signed the most in Spain

If something It reminded us of Holy Week is that seasonality continues to define employment in Spain two years after the labor reform. 68.8% of the contracts signed in March were linked to a temporary activity: 55.1% were temporary and 13.7% were permanent and discontinuous. But the data is much better than in other years, such as 2019, when the balance exceeded 92.4%, which allows the apparent paradox that membership grows even though the number of signatures falls. What remains unchanged are the jobs that these contracts concentrate: low-skilled and linked to the sectors with the worst salaries. And this is not only due to the holidays.

An analysis prepared by the SEPE from the contracts accumulated to 2023 reveals that the occupation that generates the highest percentage of contracts, 10.2% of the total, They are the waiterss, followed by the agricultural or manufacturing laborers (7% and 6.7% respectively) and the cleaning professionals (5.45%). For their part, store and warehouse salespeople they take 5.3% of the contracts.

These five professions, which make up 35% of the firms, are followed by another fifteen whose social weight ranges between 2.3% and 1.1% until they constitute the group of the 20 most hired. They account for 57% of the contracts and are for positions that, for the most part, They require little qualification.

These data are not incompatible with the impact of the labor reform, although they yield results that may be surprising. For example, 50.1% of contracts signed by waiters are indefinite (20.1% are part-time and 16.2% permanent and discontinuous), but 33% are temporary for less than seven days, the highest percentage after that of artists, which exceeds 83% of contracts of minimum duration. For its part, the profession that signs the most permanent contracts Among the group of the 20 that covers the most positions is domestic employment: here the rate exceeds 90%.

However, the most common type of initial contract is a temporary contract: that justified by production circumstances, which accounts for 41.9% of the total of those signed. It exceeds 39.6% of the initial permanent contracts, although more than a third of these were discontinuous permanent contracts. If we add the conversions, permanent contracts reach 42.6% of the total contracts signed in 2023, although as we said in the first paragraph, the total of temporary ones exceeds 57%.

The SEPE data offers additional information on the characteristics of workers. 43.9% of workers who signed a contract in 2023 had general secondary education, while only 5.7% had a vocational training degree. The latter are far below those who did not complete primary education, which totaled 9.5%. Compared to them, 15.1% of those hired had achieved a university degree or equivalent.

Age and gender biases

The type of positions for which they are hired can be explained by the size of the companies that do it: 44.1% are SMEs with less than 25 workers and 64.15 do not exceed 100 employees. 71% of these jobs are also concentrated in the service sector. The largest activity, logically, is the hospitality industry.which accumulates 2 out of every 10 contracts signed in 2023.

The breakdown by age shows that the age group that accumulates the most contracts is that of people between 25 and 34 years old, who account for 27.1% of the contracts, followed by those under 25 years old, who account for 23. 4%. For their part, those over 45 years of age register the lowest number of contracts. This distribution is the opposite of that of unemployment, which is concentrated among older workers.

By gender, the contradiction is repeated: 53.4% ​​of those subscribed in 2023 were signed by a man, compared to 46.6% of women, despite the fact that they make up 59.6%. These data show a clear bias in hiring that helps understand why certain groups, mainly women and senior professionals, are the most prone to get trapped in long-term unemployment.