Madrid (EFE).- Only 2.52% of the 1.6 million contracts started in March were signed thanks to a job offer made through the Public State Employment Service (SEPE).
According to the agency’s data, last month there were 1.6 million job placements – data that responds to the contracts started in that period – but only 40,567 of these placements were the product of an offer made through the public employment service.
The proportion, that 2.52%, is similar to that of the rest of the months: it was 2.38% in February, 2.72% in March 2022 and 2.59% in the same month of 2019, and During 2020 and 2021, years heavily influenced by the pandemic, the percentage fell to just under 2%.
In this context, in which only a marginal percentage of workers find employment through the state public service, both the UGT union and the employer have put on the table the possibility that those who reject a job stop receiving public benefits.
As can be read on the SEPE website itself, a beneficiary of benefits is obliged to “actively seek employment” and rejecting an “adequate” offer or a training course without just cause is sanctioned with the loss of the benefit for three months the first once, six months if the offense is repeated a second time and with the expiration of the benefit if there is a third time.
Given the low proportion of workers who access a job through a SEPE offer, those who leave as job seekers for “other causes” -which includes those who are withdrawn a benefit for rejecting an offer- did not reach in March nor 10% (about 80,000 people).
Sources from the Ministry of Labor have indicated to EFE that it is not possible to break down how many were fired due to the rejection of any offer of employment or training.
Entrepreneurs point to a failure in the regulations
“The current regulations do not work”, denounced in a conversation with EFE the vice president of CEOE and president of ATA, Lorenzo Amor, for whom the labor market presents two fundamental problems: the lack of qualified and unqualified labor in different sectors and the incompatibility between receiving public aid and working, which, he assures, encourages the underground economy.
Amor gives the home regime as an example, where, he affirms, there are those who are offered a work contract “and say they are not interested because they are receiving help” that they would have to reject if they accepted the job offer.
“It is absurd that aid cannot be made compatible with a job. That encourages the underground economy, because there are people who prefer to work without a contract so as not to lose aid. This must be solved ”, sums up the president of ATA.
Although he acknowledges that the mediation of SEPE in job offers is “practically nil”, Amor reaffirms the idea that any type of benefit or aid should be withdrawn from those who reject a job offer because “what cannot be It is that a person resigns from a job because it is more comfortable for them to be receiving aid”.
The unions, divided
“A person who rejects a job offer (…), if they are receiving a public subsidy, whether it is unemployment, whether it is a vital minimum, I think that the country should consider whether it should continue receiving it or not,” he reflected last month March the general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez.
Just one day later, both the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, and the general secretary of the CCOO, Unai Sordo, rejected the proposal of the UGE leader.
Sordo unlinked the problem of unemployment with the rejection of job offers for receiving aid, something that he considers “an urban myth”, and affirmed that the problem is that many jobs are offered “with low wages” and that “employment services mediate on very few occasions job offers”.
The general deputy secretary of Union Policy of the UGT, Fernando Luján, pointed out in a conversation with EFE that Álvarez’s statements “were along the lines of the fact that there is no real employment service that provides sufficient support” for the unemployed.
In statements to EFE, the secretary of CCOO Union Action, Mari Cruz Vicente, recalls that benefits are conditional on contribution periods and that there are already penalties.
He insists that the unemployment problem is related to jobs that offer “very low wages, very long hours that are not paid” and complicated geographical mobility due to the “insane” rental prices.