Spain starts 2024 employing 231,250 people on the particular January slope that employment experiences each year until the month closes 20.6 million active employees. That’s not a particularly bad number, considering it’s common for Social Security membership to decline in the early months of the year. Compared to other exercises Worst since 2020Two months after the declaration of alarm due to Covid, the labor market was dragged into a slowdown whose scenario changed radically.
After completing a record 2023 in which Social Security added more than half a million in contributions, data for January 2024 are in line with the expected cooling for this year. Despite the temporary loss of jobs this month, The outlook for this year is positivebut the intensity of job creation will be less. So the labor market will continue to bring joy, but it will be less fertile and exuberant.
This is also supported by data on the development of seasonally adjusted employment, which is the formula Social Security uses to measure how membership increases or decreases without accounting for more explosive calendar-specific factors, which skews statistics by spikes. According to them, employment increased in January, which shows that: the trend is positivebut very conservatively, with an increase of 0.2%.
Sales are gradually weakening
There was a decrease in employment according to sectors absolutely unanimously There was not a single branch of activity among employees that could avoid the red numbers at the end of January. Although the sectors that caused employment losses were the accommodation sector (-46,594), trade (-45,093) and administrative activities (-42,552) in terms of volume, the figures were almost the same as in the same month of the previous year. HE End of Christmas campaign and termination of contracts after sales campaign As usual, they marked the statistics.
This need for employment is being alleviated during January as trade is changing its patterns and dissipating the consumption fever that once dominated post-Christmas sales almost exclusively on days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Another factor that is making hiring easier and moving towards less explosive months in terms of employment development is the latest labor reform. For a month (it’s been two years) companies have been mimicking the same patterns in signing new, more stable employment relationships.
The self-employed group, on the other hand, showed high resilience to ups and downs in the economy and lost members, but to a lesser extent than employees. January ended with 16,949 fewer self-employed workers than in January; this brings the total to 3.3 million self-employed people. RETA members have generally managed to successfully get through the transition period of 2023, during which they introduced the new performance-based quota system. Currently, statistically there has been no major impact on the development of employment.
Andalusia leads to job loss
Andalusia was the autonomous community that lost the most contributors In the first month of the year, 43,624 people were employed compared to December. While the destruction of jobs was unanimous on a sectoral basis, the same thing happened at the regional level, and not a single region was saved from the red figures. Catalonia suffered like everyone else in January, but unlike the state average, the comparison is less negative. It lost almost 35,000 jobs in its weakest ‘January’ since 2019.
Considering that there are more employees in Catalonia, with 28,135 employees, a very similar decline in Social Security institutions was recorded in the country’s other economic engine, Madrid. Measured proportionally, Aragon was the autonomous region that lost the fewest members, at 0.7% compared to the provincial average of -1.1%.