The dismissals of the year in collective processes in Catalonia until October exceed the number recorded in 2022 when there are two months left for the year to end. The Department of Labor has recorded 5,689 dismissals in employment regulation files (ERO), a 36% increase.
Sources of CC.OO. they said that these bad data could be a first reflection of the slowdown in the economy that they have been noticing for a few weeks. This year there is a differentiating element compared to previous years and it is the impact of employment adjustments in technology companies, such as the outsourcing of Facebook, Glovo, Wallbox and Tripadvisor. In fact, one more month, the information technology services (ICT) sector is the one with the most redundancies: 761 people, 13% of the total. The crisis in this sector is not an exclusively Catalan process, as it has a global effect.
Labor Department sources said the specific data for October is similar to the same month last year. What is growing are the figures for the year as a whole, which are influenced by a couple of large processes that affected a significant number of workers, such as the Barcelona CCC Digital Services ERO, with more than 330 affected.
The number of layoffs is expected to continue to grow given the steady trickle of ERO, which seems to be unabated. This same week, the energy company Holaluz announced the reduction of one in four jobs in the workforce. There will be 200 in total.
The unions rule out that the layoffs are due to the labor reform, which has increased the number of workers with indefinite contracts. In a recent study, the Catalan employers’ association Foment ensured that 70% of the new indefinite contracts had a duration of less than one year.
The number of layoffs by ERO in Catalonia for the first nine months of the year is already higher than the annual figure between 2014 and 2018. 2021 was the year with the most job losses, coinciding with end of the hardest part of the pandemic, which caused some temporary files to end in job cuts.
As had happened in the previous months, those affected by suspension and reduction of working hours have dropped. In both cases, the improvement is due to the normalization of supply chains, which led to fewer factory shutdowns. Data from the Teball Department show that in the first nine months of the year there were more than 23,000 workers affected by a contract suspension. That’s less than half of what there were in the first ten months of 2022. A similar thing happens with those affected by reduced working hours, which fell to just under 2,000 from 4,364 a year earlier .
