Spain records already three months in 2017 with more than two million contracts

There is very little doubt that in 2017 the 20 million of contracts signed in a single year will be exceeded for the first time in history. During the first 10 months, more than 18 million, 1.5 million more than last year in the employment offices have already been registered, according to the data reported yesterday by the Ministry of Employment. One of the structural elements that are emerging at the exit of the crisis is the greater labour turnover and the shorter duration of contracts. This has resulted in an increasing number of contracts, to the extent that in May of this year the two million contracts signed in a single month for the first time in the statistical series were exceeded. The bar was again exceeded the following month in June. And in October it happened again. Three times in a year. The consequence of the growing number of contracts is that precariousness grows in the Spanish labor market despite its recovery. And this is seen in indicators such as temporality or part-time employment. In the first case, the temporality rate reached 27.4% during the summer, according to the INE's active population survey. But this indicator grows if data from contracts registered in Social security are taken, which raise it to 31.5% last October. It has to be traced back to the same month of 2007 to find a higher percentage. Temporary and partial when the temporary ones are also added with part-time jobs — a form of employment that in Spain is not usually desired for what is equated with underemployment — the percentage rises to 41.2% of those quoted in the General regime. In this case, you have to go even further to find a higher rate: October 2006. An aggravation of all these precarious figures is that they occur in a job market with fewer jobs than a decade ago. Then the wage earners totaled almost 15 million now approaching the 14 million. The same distance is if you take into account only indefinite employees full-time, which last October totaled 6.6 million.