Registered unemployment fell by 27,375 in December to a total of 2.7 million, the lowest figure since 2007. But the question on many people’s minds is: what would have happened if this figure had not excluded the out-of-work seasonal “fixed discontinuous” workers who register with a public employment service? They are not classified as unemployed, but as job seekers with an employment relationship, a category that in the last month of 2023 increased by 45,576 people to reach 746,077, the highest figure since the labour reform, according to the newspaper El Economista. A contrast of data that resurrects the suspicions of statistical ‘make-up’ that the Ministry of Labour has been promising for more than a year to clear up the matter without ever doing so.
Thus, in a region such as the Balearic Islands, where the tourism sector relies more on permanent than temporary workers, there are more people collecting unemployment benefits than unemployed. A factor that contributes to fuelling doubts further.
