The Minister of Labour, Yolanda Díaz, and her team have spent three years without specifying how many people with fixed-discontinuous contracts are registered in the public employment service offices, arguing that the registration of job seekers is the responsibility of the autonomous communities.
However, despite this opacity, the statistical services of the department do handle and even publish these figures. Thus, they estimate that in 2024, the number of people in this situation reached an average of 687,884 per month, which is 17.62% more than in 2023, 111% more than before the labour reform, and 191.3% more than in 2019, the year prior to the pandemic.
This figure has hovered over the entire debate about the reliability of unemployment statistics since the labour reform. This is understandable considering we are talking about workers who alternate periods of activity with periods of inactivity during which they neither receive a salary nor contribute to social security but can receive unemployment benefits, even though they do not count as registered unemployed.
The only reference available until now to estimate their number was job seekers with an employment relationship, which are quantified each month. In 2024, they reached an average of 713,305 monthly job seekers. Most, but not all, are fixed-discontinuous workers, whose exact number remained unclear. The fact is that it does appear in the Labour Statistics Yearbook, a report published months after the end of the year.
