ARCHIVED - Unemployment stabilizing in Spain after sharp rise in January

The jobless total in Murcia has still fallen by over 3 per cent in the last year

The seasonal nature of the job market in Spain is almost always responsible for an increase in the number of people out of work in this country during January as extra staff taken on in the retail and services sectors over Christmas are released, but the figures for last month which were released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Employment show that the results last month were the least encouraging in the first month of the year since 2014.

A rise of 90,248 (or 2.85 per cent) took the total back above the 3.25-million barrier for the first time since March last year at 3,253,853, and although technically the overall downward trend was maintained, the figure now stands at only 0.97 per cent (or 31,908) lower than a year ago: after six years of steady decreases this is comfortably more than 2 and a half million fewer than the peak which was reached in February 2013, but the latest figures lend yet more support to the theory that the total has bottomed out and reached stability after the rise and fall of the last decade.

At the same time, the latest data will add fuel to the debate over the Spanish government’s commitment to raising the minimum wage, which has increased by 29 per cent since 2018 and now stands at 950 euros per month.

On the other hand, though, the total of 19.16 million people affiliated to the Social Security system and making contributions is the highest on record in the month of January.

The monthly variation in the number of people registered as unemployed during January was upward in almost all of Spain’s 17 regions, the only exception being the Balearics with a slight fall of 0.44 per cent, and the sharpest rises were in Aragón, Asturias, Cantabria and Extremadura at over 4 per cent while in Murcia the figure rose by 3.5 per cent to 102,403.

In terms of the year-on-year comparison, though, the Region of Murcia compares favourably with the performance of the labour market in the country as a whole, registering a decrease of 3.66 per cent since January 2019.

It should be remembered that the monthly data regarding unemployment which are produced by the Ministry of Employment are usually lower than those featured in the quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), because the EPA also takes into account those who are out of work but for one reason or another have chosen not to register as such at employment offices. The latest EPA for the final quarter of 2019 reports that there were 3,191,900 unemployed in Spain at the end of December, 2.76 per cent fewer than twelve months previously, while in Murcia the figure reported was 117,200.

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