José Luis Fernández Santillana, Director of the USO Studies Office | A job seeker is a person who registers with public employment services, either because they have lost their job and are looking for a new one (regardless of whether they are entitled to unemployment benefits), seeking their first job, or being employed (having a job) and looking for an improvement in their work situation (a broader or better-paid position), or because they are inactive, even if they maintain their employment relationship, and in their case receive the corresponding unemployment benefit (fixed-term workers and ERTES, people in Temporary Employment Regulation proceedings).
If we perform a simple mathematical operation: from the total number of people who register with SEPE seeking employment, we subtract those who are employed, and we would have the total number of registered individuals who are not working (not employed, unemployed, or simply inactive). By the end of December, this number rose to 3,927,346, which represents 1,366,628 more people than those officially indicated as ‘registered unemployed’.
It is curious that, for example, those whom SEPE itself refers to as ‘not employed’, who we would colloquially call simply unemployed, are not considered as such. Fixed-term workers in their period of inactivity are included in the group of ‘job seekers with an employment relationship’, but it is not specified exactly how many there are; however, we do know the number of those who are in an ERTE (Temporary Employment Regulation File) and who are grouped under that heading.
To estimate the number of fixed-term workers, we subtract from the total number of job seekers with an employment relationship those who are in an ERTE. Thus, by the end of 2024, the number of inactive fixed-term workers (unemployed) would have reached 812,665.
Why does the Public Employment Service continue to maintain a methodology that does not provide the clarity and transparency necessary to understand the reality and implement measures and remedies to improve the high unemployment rate we are experiencing?
