The Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) pointed out this Wednesday that the employment figures for October show the "commitment of Spanish companies to the country", even while operating in an international environment marked by continuous price increases and in an internal political context that it describes as "short-term, election-driven" and full of "risks that erode companies' confidence, especially that of SMEs and microenterprises".
The labor market closed October with an increase of 186,612 Social Security affiliates and 43,128 more unemployed people. For the employers' organization, these figures demonstrate the strong weight of seasonal and cyclical factors in the monthly evolution of employment.
The business organization emphasizes that these figures must be interpreted considering the effect of the extraordinary process of regularizing immigrants.
As it explains, this procedure has boosted the incorporation into the Social Security system, with more than 490,500 foreign affiliates linked to that process, but, at the same time, it has raised registered unemployment by making it easier for these people to access public employment services and their labor insertion programs.
At the same time, CEOE calls for caution when examining the trajectory of affiliations, arguing that the total number of contributors does not automatically reflect the volume of effective employment.
From the employers' organization, they point out that the statistics include high-status situations that do not necessarily imply the performance of an activity at that moment, as happens with special agreements for care within the family environment, training practices, or fixed-discontinuous workers during their periods of inactivity.
Also, despite the fact that Social Security reached a historical maximum level of employment and the lowest level of unemployment in a month of October since 2007, CEOE insists that Spain continues to record one of the highest unemployment rates in the European Union and the OECD.
Along these lines, the business organization indicates that the 2,422,633 official unemployed people leave out other job seekers not included in the institutional register, whose total would place the real volume of unemployment above three million people, in a scenario of increases in all sectors and territories, while companies continue to find difficulties filling vacancies.