The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá, announced this Thursday that Social Security enrolment will increase by 217,000 people in May, “the third best figure in the historical series”. At the press conference to report on the fortnightly evolution of Social Security enrolment, Escrivá indicated that, in seasonally adjusted terms, May will see 37,000 more contributors. In his opinion, this data demonstrates the “enormous dynamism” that the labour market has been registering in recent months. “As of yesterday we had 20,278,000 jobs. At some point this month we will exceed 20.3 million people employed”, the minister flagged.
In the first five months of the year, almost 200,000 jobs have been created, most of them in the private sector, and the level of employment is almost 600,000 higher than before the Covid pandemic, according to the minister. Escrivá stressed that the Spanish economy is not only creating jobs, but that these are of higher quality thanks to the labour reform, which is leading to “spectacular” growth in permanent contracts.
He highlighted the fact that between January and May, one million more permanent contracts were signed than in previous years, of which 786,000 were permanent contracts and almost 300,000 were permanent-discontinuous contracts. At the same time, he pointed out that the creation of permanent employment is concentrated in young people under 30 years of age, where the weight of permanent contracts has risen by more than 20 points, to 60%, compared to 39% of the average for the months of May in the period 2015-2021. In the case of those over 30 years of age, the percentage of permanent contracts out of the total number of contracts reached 82% in May this year, six points higher.
Escrivá emphasised that the growth in employment and its greater stability are causing an upturn in Social Security income “above expectations”, with year-on-year rises of over 10% and a percentage of GDP close to 11%. This, he said, is allowing the Social Security deficit to be reduced “intensely”, so that by the end of the year it could be “below half a point of GDP”, compared to the negative balance of 0.9% of GDP in 2021.
