Posts Tagged paro
25% unemployment passed
It’s official – one out of every four Spaniards of working age is now unemployed. Basically, that’s the highest level of any country in the developed world.
In the last quarter, 96,000 jobs were destroyed, leaving just 17.320.300 people in employment.
And three out of every four people who lost their jobs did so in Andalucía, as the unemployment level in the region approaches 1,5 million people (we’ve only got 8 million people, for God’s sake).
The government has shrugged, said that a number of the job losses were from the public sector, says it doesn’t expect unemployment to accelerate, but also doesn’t expect it to start dropping until at least the end of 2013. So no false hope there, then.
By Andalucian provinces (from the El Mundo report):
Por provincias, la tasa de paro más elevada se da en Jaén (39,13 % y 115.200 desempleados), seguida de Almería (38,44 % y 143.700 parados), Córdoba (37,75 % y 141.400 personas en paro), Granada (37,19 % y 161.700), Huelva (36,19 % y 89.200), Cádiz (36,03 % y 211.500), Málaga (33,07 % y 262.900) y Sevilla (32,63 % y 298.600).
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Unemployed to be conscripted into wildfire recovery teams
The government has come up with a cunning plan to get those unemployed slackers off their sofas and back to work:
They’re going to conscript them into wildfire recovery teams.
El Gobierno tira de los parados para luchar contra el fuego publico.es/441943
— Publico.es (@publico_es) September 7, 2012
Since we don’t have any industry, any work or any futures, the government thinks the huge swath (hovering about 40% in Almeria) of unemployed may as well get out there with a bucket and spade and clean up the mess left by wildfires. You’re not expected to actually fight the fire, just clean it up, replant the trees and remove the carcasses of the dead tortoises / wild boars / tramps / etc.
The callup would be managed by local townhalls and the call would go out to neighbouring townhalls as well. The local unemployment office would supply a list of potential workers, and the townhalls / Diputaciones would have to provide the equipment.
You’d need a good excuse not to attend the call, but if you’re young and fit you are expected to attend, and if you don’t, you get a black mark which could lead to you losing your unemployment benefit, such as it is.
You only get paid if the townhall decides to extend your hours above a certain limit, although the townhall will have to pay social security and unemployment benefit for you, so that does get topped up, and if you break a leg or inhale too much smoke it will be treated as a work related accident.
Actually, it doesn’t sound that bad an idea…
5.693.100 unemployed – even in summer, a further 53.500 unemployed
Spains unemployment has soared to record levels this summer, despite the fact that summer is traditionally the period where, what with beach bars, hotels and whatnot, unemployment drops due to temporary summer work contracts.
A further 53.500 people lost their jobs last month to June, about 1% of the total, bringing the total number of unemployed up to 5.693.100 across the nation at the beginning of this month, or 24.63% of the active workforce.
53.28% of all youths are out of work, and there are 1.737.600 households which have not one single person in employment.
In Andalucia, there are 1.36 million people unemployed (out of a total population of around 8 million).
Meanwhile, the Junta de Andalucía has announced that it will spend 200 million euros to create 11,000 jobs over the next year and a half. This breaks down into 100 million improving education centres across Andalucia (pity they sacked all the teachers), 90 millions for reforestation and environmental improvement projects, and 10 millions to rehabilitate elderly homes.
None of which, I notice, actually helps create long term employment. More sticking plaster politics from the geniuses in Seville, whose only concern is that their builder buddies aren’t seeing many large contracts come their way.
We need 12 billion to save Bankia (and the economy will shrink another 0,3% this quater)
De Guindos, the economy minister, has announced that Madrid will have to sign a check for 12,000,000,000€ to save Bankia, the failed bank that went titsup last week, instead of the original 4,5 billion euros expected. (El Mundo)
Interestingly enough, that’s almost as much as Madrid slashed off the health and education budgets (14 billion) in an attempt to make savings and stop the country running out of cash.
Bankia has an exposure of some 37 billion euros to bad real estate debt, so expect the figure to keep rising.
Despite this, nobody (except Expansión) has suggested that they flog off their two HQ buildings in Madrid, the Norman Foster designed Torre Foster (worth 800 million) and the Kio Torres (worth about 210 million).
Look, just let the damn bank die already. Spin out the savings accounts and flog off the dead apartments at 10K a pop to the homeless.
In other news, De Guindos expects the Spanish economy to contract a further 0,3% this quarter, and unemployment to rise even further.
5,6 million unemployed (that’s 1 in every third Andaluz)
Title says it all, really. There are now 5,6 million unemployed people in Spain, out of which 1,329,600 are Andalucian – or 33.17%.
To put it another way, if you put three Andalucians in a row, one of them won’t have a job.
Across Spain, there are an estimated 1.728.400 households in which not one member draws a salary. In the first three months of the year, 365,900 people lost their jobs.
Meanwhile, the Unicaja thinktank has warned that it can’t see any job creation coming to Andalucia until mid 2014 at the earliest, and warns that unemployment will continue to rise in the region.
The number of unemployed people reached 5,639,500 at the end of March, with the unemployment rate hitting 24.4%, the national statistics agency said.
The figures came hours after rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spanish sovereign debt.
Official figures due out on Monday are expected to confirm that Spain has fallen back into recession.
Other figures released on Friday showed that Spanish retail sales were down 3.7% in March from the same point a year ago, the 21st month in row sales have fallen.
Yup, it’s a recession all right
Spain is officially in a recession after the latest economic data shows that the economy contracted 0.4% last quarter, the second quarter in a row. Which is the official definition of a recession.
And the government is expecting a further contraction of 0.5% for this quarter.
All this, ontop of the unemployment – now 24% of the active population – after another 290,000 people lost their jobs in the first three months of the year.
Ouch. Don’t forget unemployment figures in Spain only reflect people registered as “seeking work”, ie, the people on the dole. So the real amount is higher. Although a lot of people work on the black, which is why things even out and Spain hasn’t descended into chaos, what with at least one out of every five people unemployed. (In Andalucia it’s higher, of course).
Official employment stats will be published on the 27th for the first quarter of the year by INE. As you would expect, the Public Employment Service doesn’t track unemployment figures, they just cut the dole cheques, so you have to wait for the stats people to get around to publishing their figures.
I think we can forget about any improvement in the figures until at least this time next year.
Yup, things can only get worse: the recession is speeding up (six million unemployed, etc)
Ooh dear, more gloom and doom from the State. The ministry of Work reckons a further 630,000 jobs will disappear this year, bringing the total unemployment of Spain up to around 25%, or to put it another way, for every three people working, one isn’t. Or, to put it a third way, a tad under six million people will be searching for jobs. Currently, in Feb there were 5,27 million people unemployed.
So, 46 million people in Spain, of which six million will be unemployed,
The latest state figures also expect the Spanish economy to plough deep into recession, with an expected contraction of 1,7% this year, much worse than the EU expected.
De Guindos, the Minister of Economy, pointed out that we shouldn’t get too hung up about the magic “six million” figure (Remember when we were up in arms at 4 million unemployed? or 5 million?) as the “social drama” is the same for 5,9 or 6 million unemployed.
The lying socialist b*stards of the last government had said they were expecting a 2,7% growth during 2011, which explains a lot about them.
On top of everything else, Mercadona is killing our pets.
Ah, it’s all too depressing… I’m off for a drink.
Meanwhile, here’s a highly depressing graph from the World Bank showing unemployment in Spain:
5,3 million unemployed in Spain, reckons President
Wow. 5,3 million unemployed in Spain at the end of 2011, is the guess of President Rajoy. He made the comment this evening at a hearing in Congress, saying that although he had still not received the final data from the Stats people, he expected the unemployment rate for the end of 2011 to be “around” 5,3 million people. Out of a working population of around 23 million people, that means for every 4,6 workers, one person is unemployed. That’s almost a quarter of the workforce. Staggering.
Rajoy has also said he expects the final shortfall in public finance to hit 90 billion euros for 2011 (double previous estimates), and has promised a major revamp of the Spanish public finances by the 15th of Feb, including strict debt ceilings for the regions.
Hey! Unemployment dropped in the province! Break out the cava!
The latest figures from the social services office show that an additional 134.182 people signed onto the dole in October across Spain. The total number of people drawing the dole is now, officially, 4.360.926.
That’s just about the population of Eire, if anyone if keeping count (4.481.430).
The figures come a month after the official population survey showed that just under 5 million people were unemployed in Spain – that’s supposed to be people drawing the dole, as well as people who have finished the dole but are still looking for work. The 5 million is a ludicrous figure really, heavily massaged to keep it under the magic 5 million mark.
The good news? Unemployment in Almeria actually dropped last month – 436 people found a job! We’re the province with the greatest number of jobs being created last month in the whole of Spain. The bad news? We still have the highest unemployment rate in Europe, at around 35% in the province.
What cracks me up is how quietly the average Spaniard takes the news that unemployment is up again. Ah well, they seem to shrug, on the one hand you have the sun, the sea and the sangría, on the other you have unemployment. If you want a job, go north like our fathers did. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to my work, in which I am paid in black. Too busy to stop here discussing the matter…
Seriously, the sang froid with which these figures are treated makes my blood run cold, when I stop and think about it. The national mood seems to be one of pessimism, one of “we’ve had it good for too long, now we’re going back to the way Spain has always been”. News shows daily interview youths packing up and heading off to the UK, France, Germany looking for work, with a sense of pride, a sense of “these kids will now know what it was like back in the 60′s!”. It’s the Spanish equivalent of the spirit of the Blitz. The Brits grin wearily and make a cup of tea, the Spanish shrug, pack their suitcases and head north.
I notice that +gente, TVE’s evening magazine programme, has quietly dropped its segment in which it tried to find jobs for people. The last one I saw was an offer from Securitas Direct, offering 20 temporary part time telemarketing jobs – this, apparently, was deemed worthy of getting onto the national news- and today I didn’t see the segment at all.
Then you get news like the forced reopening of the Visteon plant in Cádiz. Multinational company Visteon had applied for mass redundancies for 400 members of staff at Cadiz Electronica, a factory it operates in Cadiz, saying that the factory was not viable in the current climate and it had no choice but to pull the plug. The Junta de Andalucia has today rejected the mass redundancy application and told Visteon to open the factory again, securing the 400 jobs. However, Visteon said that one of the reasons it was closing was because the factory was antiquated and needed a refit it could not afford, apart from the fact that it’s been losing money for years and isn’t expected to see a profit until 2014/2015 (and that dependent, on part, in closing down the Cadiz factory). Now, is this a brave move by the Junta, protecting the jobs of the little people? Or is it another blow to investment in the area, as more companies decide that they’d have to be mental to setup in Andalucia?
I think that little turncoat tick of an Minister for Work, Valeriano Gómez, said it best today when discussing the paro figures: they’re bad, he admitted. “We are in a worse situation now than at the beginning of the crisis” he admitted. “We are further away than ever before from a happy resolution to la crisis” he added. “We were starting to leave la crisis at the beginning of the year but now are in a worse condition than ever before” he confessed. He talked of 0% growth, he even used the word “a second recession”. He didn’t actually admit that we’re fecked, but the implication was there.
In fact, he gave up and just about admitted that the opposition PP had the right course: only with severe austerity and severe structural cuts can Spain turn around and start generating growth. (from Expansión).
I expect he then went out for a stiff drink. Hey, he’s get an extremely large paycheck at the end of the month when he’s kicked out of his cushy ministerial job, so he’s not too worried about having to join the paro queue.
Meanwhile, it’s estimated that 370,000 households in Andalucia alone have no regular source of income, with all members of the household out of work, and a total of 30% of the population of Andalucia live below the European poverty line. The Andalucian average wage is still 1,700€ less than the national average (at just 8,000€ a year), 5,000€ less than the average wage of Navarra. If the recession continues, within five years the inhabitants of Andalucia will have a worse per capita income than when Spain joined the CEE in 1986. If the EU does end the PAC farming subsidiaries to the region next year, as expected, then that dreaded day will come even sooner.
Cheers, PSOE.
Anyway, tonight at 23:00 hours marks the start of the official campaign for the 20-N elections. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning to find the streets covered in posters advertising different political parties, many of the blown away by the wind and landing in nearby bushes. I notice that Martin from Turre’s IU still has a few up from the municipal elections, I assume this was to save him some time.
Unemployment out of control in Almeria
The latest unemployment figures for Almería are, frankly, staggering: A further 1,700 people joined the dole queue last month, bringing the total number of people claiming the dole to 74,000 in the province. However, bearing in mind the number of people not eligible for dole (ie it’s ended and they can’t find work), the latest EPA (Encuesta de la Populación Activa, Study of the Active Population) claims that 111,000 people are hunting for work in Almería.
This is bearing in mind that we’re in the middle of the summer season, with the bars open and lots of work going in the local tourist trade. Ah hem.
Of course, the cynic in me suggests that a number of these people are working, but the bar owners / hotels / [insert business here] aren’t keen on paying the high taxes the government insists upon for hiring people legally – currently, about 45% of the base salary for temporary workers, 42% for full timers. Plus holidays, trainings, health and safety and a nice cash sum at the end of their contract. But maybe that’s just me.
The IU party, always there with a handy soundbite, snidely said that the most anticipated opening of the El Corte Inglés does not seem to have had the promised effect [..] of turning around our province’s economy. It’s wisecracks like this that make me consider voting for them. Then I look at their solution for the recession, and spot their plan is to prevent job losses by make it harder for companies to fire people. Right.
It’s bleeding obvious that in an economy where the only jobs going are short term jobs based around the tourism trade, it needs to be easier and cheaper to hire and fire people. Whereas both the IU and the PSOE both seem incapable of separating job creation from job retention (or even admitting that Spain’s black economy is around 20% of GDP and growing fast).
Still, good news for autonomos who don’t mind paying even more (see autonomos get the dole)
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