The PP asks in Congress for a new unemployment meter that includes "discouraged" underemployed and inactive

The 'popular' question the official data of the Government, SEPE and INE.

The PP asks in Congress for a new unemployment meter that includes "discouraged" underemployed and inactive

The 'popular' question the official data of the Government, SEPE and INE

MADRID, 7 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The plenary session of Congress this week will debate a non-legal proposal of the PP to launch a new "effective" measure of unemployment, which includes figures such as the "underemployed" or the "discouraged" inactive, since they question the "statistical objectivity "from the data published by the Public State Employment Service (SEPE), the Ministries of Labor and Social Security and even the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

It is not the first time that the Popular Group has carried out an initiative of this nature in Congress. Following the approval of the labor reform in 2021, the 'popular' consider that the Government "makes up" the employment data with permanent-discontinuous contracts, which have multiplied since the implementation of the aforementioned reform.

And it is that, the Government admitted in March in a parliamentary response that in December 2022 there were 443,078 job seekers who did not appear in the registered unemployment data because they were permanent-discontinuous in a period of inactivity.

In parallel, the Ministry of Labor reported in December that registered unemployment in the offices of the public employment services registered a decrease of 268,252 people in all of 2022, to a total of 2,837,635 unemployed, the lowest figure in a closing of year since 2007.

With this panorama, the PP wants that, within the social dialogue and in collaboration with entities and "experts in the field", the criteria of employment and affiliation statistics be updated, both those published monthly by SEPE, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and those published quarterly by the INE.

More specifically, they ask to adapt the statistical information to the "reality of the labor market", implementing alternative measures that reflect real unemployment.

Likewise, they request to include in the statistics the measurement of concepts that they consider relevant in the labor market, such as people who are not looking for work but would like to participate in the labor market, or the detail of inactive "discouraged" who do not participate in the search because they think they won't find a job or for other reasons, but they really want to work.

They also propose including the figure of the underemployed in the unemployment figures, which are those who work a few hours involuntarily because they cannot find a full-time job and also the detail of workers in ERTE.

In short, the PP seeks to provide "greater transparency" in employment data. To this end, in addition to the aforementioned measures, they propose to clarify the statistical treatment of permanent-discontinuous workers and update these data from the entry into force of the 2022 labor reform.

Here a new complementary indicator would come into play that compares, along with registered unemployment, "effective" unemployment. In addition to this, the Genoa-based training organization calls for adopting any measure that contributes to promoting transparency and reflecting the reality of the labor market, in order to "facilitate the monitoring of the real evolution of the labor market for the appropriate purposes".

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