Labor contracts of less than seven days have recorded a minimum in the period between January and June 2023, according to the data shared this Wednesday by the SEPE. This is one of the main effects of the regulation promoted by the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy of Yolanda Díaz in December 2021, since it restricted the use of this modality of contracts in favor of permanent ones and introduced penalties for agreements with a duration less than a month
According to the detail of the SEPE statistics, between January and June of this year, 3 million labor agreements have been signed in Spain that did not last a week in 2019, an exercise of normal pre-pandemic activity, since in 2020 and 2021 activity was affected by the different waves of the virus.
In general, the decrease in the number of contracts is one of the consequences of the entry into force of the labor reform – in force since January 2022 although with full effects since April of that year – and which reduced the modalities and assumptions to seal contracts temporary, promoting the signing of indefinite ones. Along with this, the reform introduced a penalty, in the form of overpricing for employers for work contracts of less than thirty days.
In total, in the first six months of the year, 7.6 million labor agreements have been signed, 20% less than last year and a 30% decrease compared to 10.9 million in 2019. With this evolution, very short-term contracts They have gone from accounting for 27% of all those signed to 20%, seven points less in 4 years. Thus, of the 7.6 million contracts in the first semester, 3.3 million were permanent, triple that in 2021 or 2019, representing 44% of the total, when before the reform they represented 10%.
Within these indefinite ones, some 1.6 million were in the discontinuous permanent modality, a type of contract that has skyrocketed in recent years. Faced with this, in the first half of the year 4.2 million temporary labor agreements were sealed, 32% less than last year and a decrease of 57% compared to 2019, a full exercise of normal pre-pandemic activity and when 9.9 were signed. million temporary contracts in the first half of the year alone.
Looking at the sectors in which the use of temporary contracts was more common, such as the hospitality industry, the differences are greater. If in 2019 2.2 million hospitality contracts were sealed in the first half of the year, in 2023 there were 1.3 million, a decrease of 41%. By type of contract, between January and June of this year, nearly 700,000 permanent contracts have been signed in the hotel industry, half of the total; while in 2019 they barely added 140,000, 6% of the total.
