Signing an indefinite contract is no longer a guarantee of job stability, according to the estimates of the Catalan employers' association Foment del Treball. Since the labor reform entered into force in 2022, seven out of ten new indefinite contracts that are signed last less than a year. These are estimates from the employers' association for Spain and Catalonia, with calculations by the human resources consultancy Randstad. This percentage is almost double what was estimated before the labor reform, when it was 40%, according to a Fedea study cited by Foment del Treball.
The director of Foment's labor relations department, Javier Ibars, opined yesterday at the presentation that data show that with the labor reform "the labor market has not been transformed", but that "there has only been an attempt to cover up the temporary under the subject of statistical artifices”. Data on the duration of indefinite contracts is not public, so Foment's figure is an estimate. From CC.OO. and the UGT of Catalonia questions this data and affirms that the labor reform has improved the labor market.
In the Foment report, prepared with data collected by the human resources consultancy Randstad, it is explained that more than 106,000 workers in Catalonia have signed two or more contracts each month in the last year. The figure is twenty times higher than before the labor reform entered into force, as can be seen in the graph. "The fact that indefinite employment has grown threefold and the number of people with more than one fixed contract signed per day is twenty times higher is proof of the short duration of indefinite employment", reflects Valentín Bote, Randstad researcher.
For Spain as a whole, Foment warns that the number of people who do not pass the trial period of their contracts has increased by eleven. It is a much higher ratio than the increase in indefinite employment.
Ibars denied that these practices hide a fraud in the law, since, he assured, companies have no alternatives. Specifically, in relation to fixed-term jobs, Ibars reflected that, "if companies are not given alternatives, they must opt for the indefinite contract".
Nuria Gilgado, from the UGT, points out that they have indeed detected an increase in the number of leavers for not having passed the trial period and assures that they have detected that it has multiplied tenfold. "It is a violation of the law", he adds. "We have detected that there are companies that fire workers just two days before the end of the trial period".
Ricard Bellera, from CC.OO., reflects that the labor reform has allowed "fewer people to be unemployed" and the quality of employment has improved.
The USO union - which did not sign the labor reform that CC.OO signed. and the UGT – assures in monthly reports that the fact that there are more indefinite contracts than people shows that they are being used fraudulently. The director of the USO studies service, José Luis Fernández, points out that the number of indefinite contracts that are not full-time has also grown. Specifically, in September in Spain, 40.1% of permanent workers were full-time, 7% less than a year earlier.
The Foment report also details that, if workers who do not work but who do not appear as unemployed are taken into account, the number of unemployed remains stable. "Hiring in Catalonia has experienced a 14% reduction between April and September 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, which raises questions about the success of the 2022 labor reform in terms of labor stability and the transformation of the labor market", says the report.
Foment asked yesterday to re-negotiate a labor reform because the current one has not limited the temporary period. The legal change agreed between the employer and the unions eliminated work and service contracts and reduced the use of temporary workers.
