Unemployment record in Spain

Una frase corta resume el panorama: tanto empleo por año, como España en 2008, no había destruido ningún país europeo desde 1932, cuando la Alemania de Brüning vio destruir 1,3 millones en la Gran Depresión, siendo la clave del ascenso del nazismo.

M. Brena, De España hasta los cantares (08/01/2009)

Update on the gloomy Spanish unemployment rate (in Spanish).

Now we have left the year 2008 behind, INEM (National Employment Institute) has published the annual data on employment and social security. Last year was one of the worse years for the employment in Spain due to the economic crisis.

In 2008 the figure of unemployed people registered in INEM went up by 999,416 people to 3,128,963 people on the dole, a 46.9% increase on the 2007 unemployment figure. This the highest figure since the INEM register started, even higher than with the previous accounting methodologies for the unemployment; the latest method dates from 1996. The current figure is higher than the January 1988 record of 3,069,088 unemployed.

According to the Eurostat in November 2008, the unemployment rate in the European Union is 7.2% and in the euro-zone, 7.8%. Spain with its 13.4% is the Euro member with the highest unemployment rate for the seventh consecutive month. Slovakia is the second one with 9.1%; the lowest unemployment rates are in Holland (2.7%), Austria (3.8%), and Ciprus (3.9%).

Spain has the biggest unemployment increase from 8.6% to 13.4% in 2008; Poland's unemployment rate was slashed by 2% to 6.5%; Germany's one decreased by 1.2%.

Actually, the amount of unemployed people is much higher than 3,128,963 if we remove the make-up of the INEM figures, which don't include:
- employed people with limited availability or job-hunters with special work conditions, who amount to 150,680 people;
- "other unemployed" or temporary subsidised field workers: 237,757 people;
- unemployed workers who are undertaking training courses at INEM, trade unions and other institutions;
- workers affected by redundancies;
- first-job hunters.

In total a figure of roughly 1 million unemployed people who have disappeared from the statistics.

Even more, we could deduct from the figure of employed people those children who have been registered with the Social Security to be awarded school insurance (who shouldn't be counted as workers).

So how many unemployed are there in Spain actually?

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