Employment is enjoying a long positive streak in Spain, and the level of 10% unemployed seems destined to fall sooner rather than later – the latest Labor Force Survey (EPA) left it at 10.4% – if forecasts from bodies like the Bank of Spain are correct. But in this scenario of justified optimism for the labor market, some groups are having more difficulty seizing the right moment of hiring: according to a report from the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (IVIE), workers over 55 already register more unemployment than their immediately lower age group, that of 25 to 54 years.
The phenomenon is striking because, historically, the last active stage before retirement was accompanied by greater job stability than the previous ones. The study by the Spanish bank, published this Monday and to which EL PAÍS had access in advance, indicates that in 1994, they had 9.2 points of unemployment less than those who were between 25 and 54 years old. This gap has not only narrowed since 2023, but has been reversed: the unemployment rate for elderly people this year stands at 9.8%, or 0.4 points more than that of employees between 25 and 54 years old.
The data places this age group still below the Spanish unemployment average, but its deterioration has caught the attention of analysts at the BBVA Foundation. It is true that employed older people benefit from better quality jobs on average, but there are notable differences between those who have managed to remain active throughout their professional career and those who have had to look for a job beyond the age of 55 because they lost theirs, entered the labor market for the first time or returned after a period of inactivity.
“The job insecurity from which the latter suffer is greater than that of the former and their possibilities of re-employment as well as the conditions of the positions to which they manage to access are also worse than those of the younger cohorts,” specifies the document. Seniority in the company is therefore a plus which often implies, among other advantages, better salary conditions.
According to data from the latest quadrennial salary structure survey, covering 2022, this is reflected in the average annual salary of seniors. This is higher than that of the rest of the employees (30,038 euros compared to 26,855 euros for those aged 25 to 54). However, for seniors with less than one year of employment, the salary is much lower (19,558 euros), and even lower than that of employees aged 25 to 54 in a similar situation (19,837 euros). The average salary of seniors who have not seen their professional career interrupted appears very far away, 40,520 euros with 30 years of seniority.
Added to this is the fact that more than half of older unemployed people are long-term unemployed, that is to say they have been looking for a job for more than a year without finding it, i.e. 57.9%. This percentage is much higher than that of unemployed people aged 25 to 54 (36.1%) and that of 16 to 24 year olds (17.8%), which means that the lower average quality of the new jobs obtained is combined with a lower probability of finding one.
Furthermore, among those who have just found a job, 52.6% obtain it with a temporary expiration date, and 10% obtain precarious employment (employees with temporary contracts of up to three months) and another 4.5% are permanently laid off. Conversely, among employees with more than 25 years of seniority, the temporary employment rate is only 2%, there is practically no precarious employment and the percentage of discontinuous permanent employees is reduced by half (2.4%).
For Lorenzo Serrano, researcher at IVIE and professor at the University of Valencia, “the employability difficulties of older workers constitute a worrying problem, especially in a context like the current one of intense demographic aging”.
Serrano believes that “efforts are being made to extend the working lives of workers in order to guarantee the sustainability of pensions and the social protection system”. But he insists on the need to “overcome prejudices and stereotypes based on age and promote training”.
The statistics support this need. Workers with more than 25 years of seniority in highly qualified professions (directors and managers, scientific and intellectual professionals, technicians and support professionals) represent 45.6% of the total and elementary professions only 7%. However, in the case of older people with new jobs, these percentages decrease significantly: only 15.6% are in highly skilled positions, while 29.4% are in elementary professions.
The situation is worse than that of young workers who have just entered the job market. Among those aged 25 to 54, higher quality professions represent 29.1% of the total and elementary professions 20%, while for young people between 16 and 24 years the percentages are 27% and 15.5% respectively, which also improves the qualification of jobs for older workers who do not accumulate seniority in their company.
The level of education seems to be decisive in this reality, because among people over 55 with higher education, the unemployment rate falls to just over half (5.4%). And the stability of their new jobs increases significantly, with six fewer points of temporary employment and 4.2 fewer points of precarious employment.
The authors of the text believe that employability problems are not always limited to a question of merit, but that there are other factors. “In a scenario where young candidates will be increasingly rare, retirements more frequent and difficulties in filling vacancies more intense, it is essential to overcome age-based stereotypes and get companies themselves to invest more in training older workers.”
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