The Ministry of Labor and the CEOE usually disagree on the resolution to give to the problems, but with regard to job vacancies, they do not even agree on determining whether or not there is a real problem. Where the employer denounces a serious deficit, and raises studies such as the recent one by KPMG that indicates that 75% of companies have difficulties filling vacancies; Yolanda DÃaz’s team argues that, according to the INE, in the fourth quarter of 2022, there were only 140,000 vacancies in Spain.
“There is no problem of vacancies, neither in the global figure, nor by sectors,” they argue from Labor, and to support the thesis they use the Quarterly Labor Cost Survey (ETCL) of the INE, which concludes that by the end of 2022, they were adding only 140,000 vacancies when 4.1 million contracts were registered. In addition, the same survey indicates that in the hotel and catering industry, one of the sectors where the lack of personnel is most pointed out, in the same period there were only 4,100 vacancies, when 602,000 contracts were registered.
In Labor they accept that there may be specific problems, but that “with how devastating the data is, nothing justifies that there are no workers in the hotel and construction industry”, and here they point to low wages as the ultimate reason for this lack of candidates to certain positions.
It is of course not the position of the employers, who have shown their concern because in sectors with high unemployment figures, there is a growing unsatisfied demand for personnel, such as construction or services. This week, the National Construction Confederation (CNC) characterized as one of the challenges suffered in 2022 the shortage of qualified personnel in construction, the progressive and alarming aging of its workforce, as well as the lack of generational change that clashes with the high youth unemployment rate.
From the unions they argue that there is no lack of workers, but better wages. “It is a problem of salaries and support,” explains Patricia Ruiz, UGT confederal secretary, referring to the task of public employment services, which she considers inefficient in matching vacancies with potentially interested workers. The trade unionist denies that there is a general problem, and reduces it to some vacancies that are difficult to fill in the hotel and construction industry.
This disagreement of positions is largely fueled by the lack of an adequate statistical index. “We have a statistical information problem to gauge the true impact of job vacancies,” says Raymond Torres, from Funcas. In this sense, it is considered that the INE Quarterly Labor Cost Survey does not offer a clear definition of a vacancy, without specifying, for example, whether it is a free job position, a position planned in the future, which would remains reliability.
“There are three factors that determine vacancies. One is the one that employers argue about the lack of suitable profiles, another that of wage unions that are not sufficiently attractive, and a third would be inefficient labor intermediation,” says Raymond Torres, adding that “there is a lack of prospectors in employment offices â€, who dive into the job market in search of potential vacancies. In the employment offices, “there are counselors, but no prospectors,” adds Torres.
