The growing digitalization of the economy, driven by the pandemic, has drawn new work realities in recent years – remote work, digital nomads – that are still minority in a country like Spain, with a high weight of commerce or hospitality.
At the beginning of 2020, Spain had 19.1 million affiliates who went to their workplaces every day and inaugurated a coalition government with an ambitious labor reform program.
Remote work was a minority option, temporary employment exceeded 26%, and there were about 60,000 people in temporary employment regulation files (ERTE).
The outbreak of the pandemic made these two elements, remote work and ERTE, the key to safeguarding employment while initiating a series of changes in the Spanish labor market that, parallel to the advancement of digitalization, have had implications in the real estate market, consumption, leisure, or work-life balance.
Regarding ERTE, which covered 3.1 million workers at the worst moment of the pandemic, they have become an element of labor flexibility alternative to dismissal, in a country that tended to rapidly destroy employment in each crisis.
After several modifications to adapt the conditions of these files to the changing situation of the pandemic, the Government finally established with labor reform two possibilities of ERTE and a mechanism (called RED) for cyclical or sectoral conjunctural crises.
The boom of remote work
One of the biggest changes in recent years has been remote work, a modality barely used in Spain and still maintained four years later, although it has been limited in days and restricted to certain professional profiles or types of companies, being more common in larger ones.
By the end of 2023 about 3 million people were occasionally teleworking or more than half of the days, accounting for 14% of the total.
This change has directly affected the office market, which continues to adapt to these hybrid modalities and in 2023 suffered a 53% decrease in investment.
Along with this, the figure of digital nomads has emerged, a type of work that especially attracts young people, both freelancers and employees, with technological profiles and coming from Nordic countries for whom Spain has become one of the preferred destinations.
These movements, still minority, have also opened the debate about the impact on housing prices – with cities like Malaga where they have skyrocketed since 2020 – on local commerce or on certain models of food service, which have seen the traditional daily menu fall.
On the other hand, e-commerce has reached unprecedented levels in Spain with €21.803 million in revenue between July and September 2023, a 15.2% increase over the same period the previous year and a figure never reached by this shopping channel for a quarter.
Platform Work and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In this context, platform work has also gained special relevance.
With the so-called “riders” (bike couriers) as the main example, it is a way of organizing work based on the figure of the self-employed person, but with rules set by the company and a special weight of algorithms.
In Spain, a law was passed that established the employee status of the “riders” although its application has sparked problems among different companies.
In Europe, a regulation was also approved that extended the presumption of labor and demanded more transparency in the use of algorithms, making it one of the big challenges facing employment alongside the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
According to an analysis by the consulting firm Accenture, almost 73% of companies worldwide are prioritizing AI over other digital investments.
Regarding the impact on employment, studies and projections indicate as much destruction of positions as the creation of new ones associated with AI and warn of the risks of increasingly dispersed and unregulated work environments.
In this context of change, the Spanish labor market has shown a strong recovery. Since the pandemic, Spain has added 1.9 million affiliates on average, with women playing a prominent role in this job creation.
They occupy 60% of the new jobs created in the last four years, reaching nearly 10 million affiliates.
And this was after approving a labor reform in 2021 that reduced temporary employment to 12.7% and promoted the figure of the discontinuous permanent employee, a modality that has generated controversy with requests to the Government for more details on workers during periods of inactivity.
Looking to the Future: New Jobs and Work Times
Another open debate has been about the use of time with a pilot project for a 32-hour workweek that has not yet started and the commitment to reduce the workweek to 37.5 hours per week without a reduction in salary, a measure that would affect more than 12 million waged workers.
A recent report from the Bank of Spain called for flexibility when reducing the workweek by law so that companies “can adjust the hours worked to their specific conditions,” thereby avoiding negative effects on labor costs, productivity, and the overall level of employment and activity.
In this context, the mismatch between supply and demand has worsened in recent years, increasing the number of job vacancies from 101,009 at the end of 2019, according to the INE Quarterly Labor Cost Survey, to peak in the third quarter of 2023 with 155,797 and then slightly decrease.
Although various reports point to STEM profiles (scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians), it also affects sectors highly intensive in unskilled labor, such as construction or hospitality.
