Availability to work and job search: inactivity as unemployment veil. An analysis of Spanish potential working force

SOFIA PEREZ DE GUZMAN PADRON; VALENTINA VIEGO; MARGARITA GALLEGO SANCHEZ

BUENOS AIRES

Conferencia; 36th International Labour Process Conference; 2018

CEIL

Despite the increase in employment and the reduction of unemployment that has taken place in Spain since mid-2013, almost 75% of Spanish population consider unemployment as the main problem in that country (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2016). Some researchers (Prieto, 2017) have argued that this apparent mismatch between official statistics and population views is explained by the fact that, for the Spanish population, the vulnerability of precarious workers places them closer to unemployment than to employment. A second complementary explanation is related to the existence of a "sociological unemployment" (Sanchís and Simó, 2014: 53) that remains hidden in officialfigures due to the regular criteria applied to identify individuals into and outside the labor force, which consider those people who are available to work but do not search for job as non-active; any average citizen would consider those individuals as unemployed. The objective of this work is precisely to analyze this group, whose magnitude currently exceeds 500 thousand people. Its evolution is analyzed in the last years in order to determine if (and how) the Great Recession has influenced the size of potential working force. Subsequently profiles are presented in terms of age, levels of education, nationality,trajectories with respect to job and, especially, gender and how they influence their attitudes towards job search. We carried out a statistical analysis based on the microdata of the Survey of Active Population using multivariate logistic regressions in order to estimate the probability of belonging to different categories of non-working population according to the characteristics of the subjects.