After starting 2023 negatively, the labor market faces an endurance race this year due to the slowdown in growth, in which it will be verified whether the paradigm shift of the labor reform is consolidated, after having overcome a positive 2022 in which Employment in Spain has reached levels prior to the 2008 financial crisis.
The Spanish labor market is marked by seasonality and due to the end of the Christmas season, the data usually generate a negative start to the year, although the seasonally adjusted data reveal the good tone of employment with figures above the average for the other months of January .
The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations, José Luis Escrivá, insists on the figures adjusted for the calendar, stressing that the year has started well despite the complicated environment. Also some private BBVA analysts
However, both public and private analysts predict a slowdown in employment for 2023, in line with the slowdown in the Spanish economy, whose growth rate will slow down by at least half.
The Government itself predicts employment growth equivalent to a full-time job of 0.6% in 2023, while the consensus of analysts made up by the Funcas panel figures it at 1%, although with heterogeneous forecasts ranging from stagnation (0.1 %) predicted by Mapfre Economics, up to the 2.7% increase predicted by Equipo Económico.
Funcas is in the low range, with a forecast for employment growth of 0.5%, which its director of the Economic Situation, Raymond Torres, explains by a context of lower GDP growth. “2023 cannot maintain the same rate of job creation as 2022 in a context of lower GDP growth,” Torres told EFE, although he anticipates that it may not be a year “as complicated as expected a few months ago.” .
In his opinion, the greatest impact of inflation on the purchasing power of consumers could already have passed, while the uncertainties associated with the conflict in Ukraine are more limited than a year ago when the conflict broke out.
It will be more difficult for unemployment to fall below 3 million people% of the active population in 2023 (12.87% at the end of 2022). The Government, however, calculates that the average unemployment rate for 2023 will drop to 12.2%.
THE EMPLOYERS BELIEVE THAT THE GOOD EMPLOYMENT DATA ARE A MIRAGE
The employers’ association of private employment agencies Asempleo considers that the “resilience” shown by the labor market in 2023 has been “a statistical mirage” that hides the weakening of the private sector.
For Asempleo, the barrier of three million unemployed “seems like a magnet from which we are condemned not to move away”, which is why it has long been necessary to stop “the wear and tear” of the high unemployment rate with policies that do not treat to hide this problem “under the premise of reducing temporality”.
Among the companies that are part of Asempleo, the Adecco group forecasts that job creation will weaken during the first quarter of the year, in line with what happened in the fourth quarter of 2022, and ensures that the strong recovery stage of the labor market has finished, to give way to a new scenario of “mini-growth”.
