My good friend, the economist César Molinas, is convinced that there is full employment in Spain, since “there is no one who wants to work who cannot find a job, another thing is that the employment is not the desired”. As in the rest of Europe, where with a little more than 6% unemployment, the best figures ever suspected have been reached.
The same vice-president of the European Central Bank, Luis de Guindos, has publicly confessed his surprise at the fact that in the midst of a slowdown in growth, the highest level of job creation is being produced, both in terms of number of workers and hours worked “I don’t remember anything like this happening in a long time.”
The case of the United States is paradigmatic. With an unemployment rate of 4%, they need more emigrants to cover the jobs that their growth demands.
It is no less surprising that this resilience of the labor market occurs in the midst of a wave of immigrant arrivals, which in turn unleashes the rebirth of xenophobic sentiment and contributes to the popularity of ultra-conservative parties in different parts of the world.
It is also shocking that the development of employment coincides in time with artificial intelligence, digitization and technological changes that, as we are told, will destroy hundreds of professions and jobs that will be filled by robots . Perhaps what could be happening is that the destruction of one kind of jobs causes the birth of new professions with more added value.
But the truth is that it is a phenomenon that has surprised the big central banks and centers of economic analysis. No one quite understands how it is possible that, in an economy that is slowing down more and more as a result of rising interest rates to contain inflation, employment expectations are getting better and better, which in turn pulls wages rise and, consequently, the consumer price index.
In Spain the phenomenon is even more complex, because our unemployment rate continues to double the European average, especially for young people. What is happening to us?
According to César Molinas, part of the population does not want to work. This would explain that 149,645 jobs, according to the INE figures, have remained unfilled in the last year.
For José Carlos Díez, “the main problem of the economy is not the creation of employment, but the type of employment and the lack of productivity”. It is not that young people do not want to work, but that the occupations offered to them are far below their professional qualifications. And he ends with a sentence that is worth thinking about: “The high dynamism of the economy and its labor dynamism is indifferent to the color of the party in government and labor legislation.” Beyond the current situation, we need a country project.
