My good friend, the economist César Molinas, is convinced that there is full employment in Spain, given that “there is no one who wants to work who cannot find a job, another thing is that the occupation is not the desired one.” As in the rest of Europe, with just over 6% unemployment, the best figures ever suspected have been reached.
The vice-president of the European Central Bank, Luis de Guindos, has publicly confessed his surprise that, in the midst of a slowdown in growth, the highest level of job creation is taking place, both in number of workers and in hours worked: “I don’t remember Nothing like it has happened in a long time.”
The case of the US is paradigmatic. With an unemployment rate of 4%, they need more immigrants to cover the jobs that their growth demands.
It is not surprising that this resilience of the labor market occurs in the midst of a wave of immigrant arrivals, which in turn unleashes the revival 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 is coinciding 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 type of job causes the birth of new professions with greater added value.
But the truth is that it is a phenomenon that has surprised the big central banks and economic analysis centers. Nobody quite understands how it is possible that in an economy that is slowing down more and more as a result of the rise in interest rates to contain inflation, employment expectations are getting better, which in turn pushes up wages and , consequently, of the consumer price index.
In Spain, the phenomenon is even more complex because our unemployment rate continues to double the European average, especially in the case of young people. What is happening to us?
According to César Molinas, a part of the population does not want to work. This would explain why 149,645 jobs, according to INE figures, have been left 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 rather that the occupations that are offered to them are well below their professional qualifications. And he ends with a sentence that is to think: “The high dynamism of the economy and its labor dynamism is indifferent to the color of the party in government and to labor legislation.” Beyond the situation, we need a country project.
