Spanish unemployment rate drops to lowest level since 2011

Spain created more than 400,000 jobs in the second quarter, bringing the unemployment rate down to its lowest level since 2011. However, the opposition warns that many of the new jobs are temporary and of poor quality.

The Active Population Study figures released by the National Statistics Institute on Thursday showed that, in the three-month period to end-June, 411,000 jobs were created, bringing the unemployment rate down to 22.4 per cent. That is just below the level it was at when prime minister Mariano Rajoy took office in December 2011.

At a conference in Madrid organised by newspaper La Razón, the prime minister said the new figures confirmed that Spain has emerged from an economic slump that began in 2008.

“If we showed in 2014 that we were going in the right direction, in 2015 we’re confirming that we’re going faster and faster,” he said.

“Never in Spanish economic history have so many jobs been created in one quarter. We’ve gone from creating half of Europe’s unemployment to creating half of its jobs. It is a great change.”

Nearly three-quarters of the new jobs were in the services sector. But industry also benefitted and the construction sector, which was at the heart of Spain’s recent economic crisis, created 32,000 jobs.

Unemployment has been one of the main challenges for this conservative Popular Party (PP) government, reaching a high of 27 per cent in 2013 before the current recovery got underway. Although Spain still has the second-highest jobless rate in Europe after Greece, the improvement in the jobs market is a major boost to the government ahead of a general election that is expected to take place at the end of this year.

However, the political opposition has criticised the nature of the new work being created.

“They are poorly paid and temporary jobs which only hand out squalor,” said Íñigo Errejón, deputy leader of anti-austerity party Podemos. He pointed out that the second quarter of the year is traditionally good for the labour market, because companies hire workers on temporary contracts for the summer months.

While the government attributes much of the country’s recent job creation to a labour reform it introduced in 2012, Podemos and the main labour unions say that the legislation undermined workers’ job stability.