Should the subsidy be abolished for someone who refuses a job offer?

Only 2.52% of 1.6 million contracts launched in the month of March were signed thanks to an offer from employment carried out through the State Employment Service (SEPE). Only 40,567 of those placements were the result of the agency’s offer.

The ratio is repeated month after month: in February it was 2.38%, in March 2022 it was 2.72% and in the same month in 2019 it was 2.59%, and during 2020 and 2021, the years heavily influenced by the pandemic, the percentage fell slightly below 2%.

In this context, in which only a marginal percentage of workers are employed through the state public service, both union UGT like a big employer CEO They put it on the table the possibility that those who refuse to work will stop receiving public benefits.

As can be read on the SEPE website itself, the recipient of the allowance is obliged to “actively seek employment”, and refusal of a “suitable” offer or training course without a valid reason is punished by the loss of the allowance three months the first time, six months if the offense is repeated a second time and by canceling the benefit if it is the third time.

Considering the low proportion of workers who find work through the SEPE offer, those who leave as jobseekers for “other reasons” – which includes those whose benefits have been withdrawn due to the rejection of the offer – did not even reach 10% in March (about 80,000 people ).

sources Ministry of Labour They told Efe that it was not possible to describe how many were fired for refusing any offer of employment or training.

Entrepreneurs discover deficiencies in regulations

“The current regulations are not working,” condemns the CEOE vice-president and president ATA, Lawrence Love, for which the labor market represents two fundamental problems: the lack of skilled and unskilled labor and the incompatibility between receiving state aid and workwhich, he assures, encourages the gray economy.

Amor cites the example of the domestic regime, where, he claims, there are those who are offered a work contract “and say they are not interested because they are receiving help” who would have had to refuse if they had accepted the offer.

“It is absurd that aid cannot be combined with work. This encourages the gray economy, because there are people who prefer to work without a contract in order not to lose the benefits. This has to be solved”, summarizes the president of ATA.

While admitting that SEPE’s mediation of job offers is “virtually non-existent”, Amor reaffirms the idea that any kind of benefit or assistance should be withdrawn from those who reject a job offer because “What cannot happen is that a person quits his job because he is more comfortable receiving help”.

Trade unions divided

“A person who rejects a job offer […]if you receive a public subsidy, whether it’s unemployment, whether it’s a vital minimum, I believe the country should consider whether it should continue to receive it or not, ” thought last March the Secretary General of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez.

Just one day later, both the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, and the Secretary General Workers’ Commissions (CC.OO.), I’m deafrejected the approach of the UGE leader.

Sordo separated the problem of unemployment with the refusal of offers to receive assistance, which he considers an “urban myth”, and stated that the problem is that many jobs are offered “with low wages” and that “employment services mediate very few opportunities for job offers. “

The UGT’s deputy general secretary of trade union policy, Fernando Luján, points out that Álvarez’s statements “were in line with the fact that there is no real employment service that provides sufficient support” for the unemployed.

CC.OO’s secretary for trade union action, Mari Cruz Vicente, recalls that the benefits are conditional on the contribution payment periods and that there are already penaltiesand insists that the unemployment problem is linked to jobs that offer “very low wages, very long unpaid hours” and complicated geographic mobility due to “crazy” rental prices.