How many NEETs are there in Spain? Or what is the same, how many young people are there who neither study nor work? That is the question that the Spanish Youth Council (CJE) has asked itself, after hearing on different occasions that this percentage exceeds 10%, even reaching 15% in previous years.
Are there so many young people who do nothing? They insist from this entity, made up of more than 60 youth entities, created by law in 1983 and made up of the Youth Councils of the autonomous communities and youth organizations at the state level. In his opinion, no.
According to the latest official data (Eurostat and the OECD), in Spain the percentage of NEETs is 12.7%, but the CJE Emancipation Observatory, which uses data from the Active Population Survey, at the end of 2022 the rate It was 2.4%. Noticeably lower. How is it possible?
To undo this mess, the CJE research team got to work delving into the studies and has reached a conclusion: the reason for these differences is the transposition of the NEET rate (one of the main indicators of the table of social indicators for the European Pillar of Social Rights which establishes the proportion of young people, aged between 15 and 29, who are not in education, employment or training) directly, something that is questioned by the Youth Council, which uses “a much more specific and fair description of the situation of young people in our country.”
In his opinion, it is wrong, as well as unfair and pejorative, to classify a young person who does not work and does not study as NEET, since there may be different reasons why he does not do one activity or the other.
For the Youth Council, it is necessary to take into account whether or not the young person is looking for work (something that the NEET rate does not contemplate). Since, they point out, in a labor market like the Spanish one, in which young people are forced to accept jobs with high rates of temporary employment on many occasions, "it does not seem fair to us that a young person who is fired from his job For example, after spending the entire summer season working in hospitality and looking for work, you are classified as NEET.
The second factor that this entity takes into account is whether they are available to work, “since a young person who has suffered a disability that prevents them from carrying out a work activity should not be classified as NEET either,” they point out.
And the third factor that the CJE uses to classify a young person as NEET is whether their inactivity situation is explained because they have an illness, because they must care for dependent people or because they have other personal or family responsibilities.
“In 2022, 9.8% of young women who were not looking for work were not doing so because they were dedicated to 'household work', a category contemplated by the INE. It does not seem fair to classify these young women who are dedicating themselves to care as NEET,” they point out from this youth platform.
These three factors considered by the CJE are what explain the difference of more than ten points with the official figures. But, they insist, their data is more in line with the reality of Spanish youth. Therefore, they request that the way of calculating this rate be modified, which portrays a part of society as lazy, useless and lacking ambition.
