MADRID, 30 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –

Spain currently has 1.5 million long-term unemployed (more than a year unemployed), which is already chaining 13 years with more than one million people in this situation, most of them women, people over 55 years of age and with a low educational level, according to a study by Asempleo.

Despite the fact that the labor market has experienced two great moments of job creation in the last 13 years (the period 2014-2019 after the financial crisis and the period 2021-2022 after the pandemic), the group of long-term unemployed It continues to exceed one million people, which, according to Asempleo, shows the difficulties these people have in finding a job.

The longer a person remains unemployed, the more difficult it is for them to return to work. In the first quarter of this year, an unemployed person who had been unemployed for less than a year was almost three times more likely to find a job than a long-term unemployed person.

According to Asempleo, for workers who have been unemployed for more than a year, temporary contracts “act as a springboard towards employment, by minimizing the risks that employers face when they hire a person who has been out of work for so long.”

The ability to leave unemployment is inversely proportional to age, so that older people are more likely to remain unemployed for more than twelve consecutive months. In fact, three out of four unemployed women and two out of three unemployed men over the age of 55 have been in this situation for more than a year.

Asempleo warns in this study that women have greater difficulties in leaving unemployment than men, since 50% of unemployed women have been unemployed for more than a year compared to 44% of men. “The gender gap in this area begins to be perceived after 40 years of age, coinciding with the time of motherhood,” says the employers of private employment agencies.

Another relevant factor that determines the employability of the unemployed is their educational level. Thus, the more training, the less probability of remaining unemployed for more than a year. In fact, 52% of the unemployed who have completed compulsory education at most have been in this situation for more than a year, compared to 43% of those who have a university degree.

“This highlights the importance of training throughout working life, something essential for older people, which allows them to update their skills to the new demands of the market, which change at great speed as a result of the digital transformation process. “remarks the study.

However, the Spanish situation regarding long-term unemployment is not an anomaly in the European context, according to Asempleo.

Thus, although Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union (13.3% at the end of 2021), it is not the Spanish unemployed who remain in this situation the longest.

According to Eurostat data, 42.8% of the Spanish unemployed between the ages of 15 and 74 had been unemployed for more than a year, compared to 68% of the Slovaks, 65% of the Greeks, 61% of the Italians or 48% of the Portuguese. On the opposite side are Denmark and the Netherlands, where barely one in five unemployed has been in this situation for more than a year.

In Spain, once the unemployment benefit has been exhausted, the long-term unemployed can opt for unemployment subsidy if they have family responsibilities or, if not, for active insertion income.

As of March 2022, Asempleo estimates that around two out of three people who had been unemployed for more than a year received some type of benefit. However, it specifies that the coverage rate of the long-term unemployed is heterogeneous depending on each autonomous community.

In general, Asempleo points out that there is a positive correlation between the number of unemployed who have been unemployed for more than a year and the percentage of those who receive a benefit.

Thus, the unemployed from the Canary Islands, La Mancha and Valencia are the ones who have been unemployed the longest, along with the Basques, and the ones who receive the most benefits once they find themselves in this situation. At the other extreme are Navarra, Aragón, La Rioja and the Balearic Islands.