For better and for worse

An end to the gender gap, better quality employment, higher wages and decent pensions are the main demands of the protest that today will, as every May Day, be in our streets. Gone are the darkest years of the crisis which destroyed more than 650,000 jobs between 2008 and 2013, and the recovery of the labour market has been certainly evident for two years, but this improvement has many sides to it. Employers and agencies emphasise the dynamism in services, the motor industry, logistics and even the real estate sector, but unions tell us the price of this progress is very high and in job insecurity is more than alarming.

Once strictly protected, labour agreements now leave unions and workers with little power and can change at the whim of the employers. Workers have scant protection and many are doing jobs they are not qualified for, leaving others on the dole.

Professor of Applied Economics at the AB Josep Oliver, an expert in the Catalan labour market, admits that the recovery has been possible thanks to the “moderation” of wages and certain groups have suffered. It is harder for young people to enter the employment market, for example. Temporary employment, short contracts, outsourcing are all part and parcel of a system which does not protect workers but looks positive when analysed on paper.

Certain sectors such as e-commerce, transport and logistics assume the market volatility as a plus for both company and worker, but in these cases, the worker is more than often highly qualified and can move to some extent freely within the market. This is not the case for most workers.