47% of all the long-term unemployed, those who have been looking for work for more than two years, are over 50 years old, reflecting the difficulty of this group in finding a job opportunity even in a context of strong recovery in employment. According to data from the Active Population Survey (EPA) for the second quarter of this year, the latest available, 759,900 unemployed in Spain, had been looking for a job for 2 or more years and of them, practically half, 361.6 00, are over 50 years.
Although the absolute figures have fallen in a scenario of strong job creation, their weight in the total long-term unemployed continues to rise: in the second quarter of 2022, they accounted for 44% and before the pandemic, in the same period of 2019, 42%. In general, the long-term unemployed account for 27.5% of the total -which stood at 2,762,500 after a strong quarterly drop of 365,300 people-, but their proportion scales in the older age groups.
In detail by bands from that barrier of 50, the largest group is the 55 to 59 year old, with 309,600 unemployed, and of these, 132,700, 42%, with 2 or more years looking for work. At higher ages, the weight of long-term unemployment reaches 60%.
In total, in Spain there are 838,400 unemployed over the age of 50, representing 30% of the global figure, a percentage that has multiplied in the last decade: in 2013, with high levels of unemployment, only 18% of the unemployed was over that age. And although, at a time of strong recovery in employment, unemployment has also fallen in this group of long-term older unemployed -there are 194,500 fewer than a year earlier- it has done so at a slower rate than the general figure and among others age bands.
The so-called “sink effect”
“It is the so-called sink effect: an important part of the talent of a generation is being wasted because it is considered a priori that it is not valid due to existing prejudices and the lack of support measures,” summarizes Javier Blasco, director of the Adecco Group Institute, for EFE. .
Among the measures proposed to address this situation, he explains, is the development of adequate incentives for hiring people over 45 years of age, with Social Security bonuses, changes in training for employment and training contracts or aid to the major undertaking. “It is a structural problem in which solutions are not easy and you have to fight against a huge prejudice against senior talent,” summarizes Blasco.
“It is the public powers that can and must configure the appropriate framework to take advantage of the capacity and potential of those over 55 years of age,” the president of Fundación Mapfre, Antonio Huertas, recently claimed during the presentation of a report by the Age research center ingomic.
A more complicated picture for women.
The latest talent map drawn up by this center also pointed out that the situation is more complicated for women. “Being older and being a woman are not good letters of introduction for employment,” summarized his latest map of senior talent that places Spain at the head of Europe in unemployment for the elderly, especially among women.
Returning to the EPA data, of all the unemployed who have been looking for work for more than 2 years, 55% are women, and among those over 50 they are also the majority. “Senior unemployment has a more intense evolution in the case of women,” underlines the aforementioned Mapfre study, which points out some ways to improve this situation. Among them, the improvement of continuous training stands out, the promotion of new professional requalification programs with public resources and the support of senior entrepreneurship.
