MADRID, 15 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Four out of ten permanent contracts signed in 2022 were permanent-discontinuous, the same proportion as those signed full-time, while two out of ten were part-time, according to the 'Quarterly Observatory of the labor market' prepared by The Adecco Group Institute and the Cuatrecasas Institute of Legal Strategy in Human Resources.

The director of the Adecco group study center, Javier Blasco, has stressed that one of the criticisms of the labor reform after its first year of application is precisely "the photography of permanent-discontinuous workers as a new paradigm of quality and sustainability of work ".

"Companies have lost flexibility and solutions to cover temporary hiring needs, which will have to coexist with other, stable or pseudo-stable, employment formulas. And for this reason it is not surprising that the private employment agency sector claims to increase its participation in this type of contractual modality, providing solutions to fixed-discontinuous needs, which are complemented with ambitious requalification plans", defends Blasco.

In the first month of 2023, 1,151,747 initial contracts were made, 24.1% less than a year earlier, of which 670,443 were temporary (-50.6% year-on-year) and 481,304 permanent, triple that of January 2022 .

Within the permanent, permanent-discontinuous contracts totaled 169,999, multiplying the figure for January 2022 by more than seven. Thus, of the total initial contracts in January, 58.2% were temporary contracts and 41.8% were permanent contracts, of which 35.5% were permanent-discontinuous. The latter therefore represented 14.8% of all initial contracts.

Considering the hiring/affiliation ratio to the Social Security in January, that of permanent-discontinuous workers stood at 21.5%, compared to 4.6% for part-time permanent workers and 2.3% for full-time permanent.

The study indicates that, when comparing quarters, the fixed-discontinuous ratio shot up to 75.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022, a figure much higher than that of the same period of the previous year (14.7%) and the most high of all fourth quarters since 2009.

According to this report, based on official data published by the Government, 40.8% of the contracts signed in December 2022 had an average duration of one month or less, while 23% had a duration of one week or less. . In total, the average duration of the contracts was 48.3 days in 2022 compared to 53.4 days in 2021 (-9.5%).

For its part, the number of companies registered with Social Security stood at 1,313,133 last January (-1.3% month-on-month; 0.04% year-on-year), with the construction sector being the only one that showed an increase of companies registered with respect to the previous month.

Guillermo Tena, director of the Cuatrecasas Institute for Legal Strategy in Human Resources, has warned that in 2023 there will be "a complex paradox to manage: the need to adapt and retrain staff and the lack of talent necessary to be able to deal with many of those business challenges.

"Therefore, this is going to require all the innovation and creativity of the companies' attraction and recruitment teams," he added.