Roberto Ordúñez |
Madrid (EFE).- Job vacancies in Spain, that is, those jobs that are not covered, are at the bottom of Europe if they are measured in relation to the total number of employed persons and are largely due to the lack of personnel in the public sector, which accumulates more than one in three vacancies.
According to Eurostat, in the first quarter there were 141,654 vacancies in Spain, a figure very similar to that of the previous quarter (140,517) and to that of the same period last year (133,990).
The European statistical office also calculates the ratio of vacancies to total employed, a measure that places Spain (0.9) far from the average for the European Union (2.8) and the Eurozone (3.1). , which indicates a lower number of unfilled positions in Spain in relation to the total number of workers.
From the Ministry of Labor they indicate that this lower proportion of vacancies according to the total number of employed persons is explained by the unemployment registered by Spain, well above the European average and which facilitates the coverage of vacancies thanks to a considerable reserve of workers.
That ratio of 0.9 that Eurostat calculates for Spain in the first quarter of this year remains unchanged from the same period in 2022 and would only have added 0.4 points since the beginning of the series, in the second quarter of 2020.
The National Institute of Statistics (INE) provides Eurostat with the data, which it disseminates in the quarterly labor cost survey (ETCL), whose latest update is for the fourth quarter of 2022.
According to this survey, of the 140,517 vacancies at the end of the year, 36.6% (51,426) were in the Public Administration, Defense and Social Security.
Controversy over lack of manpower
The employer’s complaints about the difficulty in finding certain profiles, especially since the pandemic, clashes with the 3.12 million unemployed registered by the Active Population Survey (EPA) in the first quarter and with the low vacancy ratio that it calculates Eurostat.
Between the last quarter of 2021 and 2022, the total number of vacancies increased by 28.81% (almost 30,000 more), although some of the activities in which there have been alerts of a lack of labor, such as construction and hospitality , registered falls of 40.4% and 6.6%, respectively.
The largest number of vacancies in the private sector is found in commerce (14,259 at the end of 2022), which did register a year-on-year increase of 5.8%, although far from the 63.1% increase in the public sector, whose vacancies increased by almost 20,000.
Experts from human resources companies consulted by EFE point out a lack of professionals with scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical degrees, since demand is increasing at a faster rate than that of graduates.
Vacancies in professional, scientific and technical activities went from 8,477 in the last quarter of 2021 to 9,870 in the same period of 2022, an increase of 16.4%.
CEOE sources point to a mismatch between training and the company’s needs for new profiles to make the double ecological and digital transition, as well as a failure in the professional orientation of young people.
Worse wages in sectors with a lack of labor
A study by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) published this week indicates that the sectors that have the greatest problems finding staff pay an average of 9% less than those that find it easier to hire labor, a percentage than in Spain amounts to 10.5%.
During the CES Congress, held in Berlin, the general secretary of the CCOO, Unai Sordo, stated that “the main reason for not finding workers is low wages”, although he recognized other factors such as “training problems” or the increase in the cost of the housing in coastal areas.
“We do not believe that there is a problem of vacancies due to a shortage of qualified people,” the confederal secretary of the UGT, Patricia Ruiz, assures EFE, who points to working conditions as causes of the lack of labor in sectors such as hospitality or construction.
Ruiz affirms that the difficult filling of vacancies is found in the service sector, where the more than 3 million unemployed “would be willing to work”, while he considers that the vacancies due to the lack of highly qualified workers “are not significant”.
From the Ministry of Labor they agree that there is no problem of vacancies in a general way and they also point to working conditions as the cause of the fact that in some sectors it is difficult to find workers.
This position clashes with that of the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, which is finalizing the relaxation of the requirements to regularize immigrants in order to cover the jobs that cannot be filled.