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/MAY DAY/ SPAIN: Women Bear Brunt of Growing Unemployment
By Alicia Fraerman
MADRID, Apr 30 (IPS) - Unemployment in Spain rose to 11.73 percent
in the first quarter of this year - the highest rate among the 15
European Union (EU) countries. But women have been hit hardest,
according to a new government survey.
The Survey of the Active Population, whose results were
released Tuesday, found that 64,500 people in this country of 39
million joined the ranks of the unemployed in the first three
months of the year.
The average EU unemployment rate is 7.9 percent of the
economically active population, according to Eurostat, the
Statistical Office of the European Communities.
In the latest opinion polls conducted by the governmental
Centre for Sociological Research, respondents mentioned
unemployment as the most pressing problem in Spain, ahead of
concerns like terrorism (waged by the Basque separatist
organisation ETA), crime, or housing shortages.
The increasing precariousness and instability of work also
means that merely having a job does not necessarily imply the
ability to adequately support a family or provide security for the
future, said respondents.
Currently, one-third of all labour contracts in Spain are
temporary, and the minimum wage is considered insufficient by
labour activists.
For women, the situation is even more difficult. In the EU, the
rate of employment for women is 18 percent lower on average than
for men, compared to 30 percent lower in Spain.
The rise in the total number of jobless in the first quarter of
the year was 3.5 percent higher than the increase reported in the
same period of 2002.
The newly unemployed included three women for every man (48,600
women and 15,900 men out of a total of 64,500).
Unemployment among women who form part of the economically
active population - those who either work or are trying to find a
job - now stands at 16.55 percent, nearly double the 8.39 percent
rate among men.
In the January to March period, 119,600 people joined the
economically active population, including the 64,500 people who
failed to find work and 55,100 who did. In other words, less than
half of those arriving, or returning, to the labour market found
employment.
Spain's female unemployment rate has grown to nearly double the
average in the rest of the EU countries, said a spokesperson for
the UGT, the central trade union aligned with the Spanish
Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE).
Women's groups are demanding the adoption of additional, and
more effective, measures against gender discrimination, which has
diminished but has not disappeared in recent years.
''It is not enough to say that equal opportunity exists,''
Enriqueta Chicano Jávega, president of the Federation of
Progressive Women, told IPS.
''Let's take the example of a race: if a woman and a man set
out from the same starting line and have to run the same distance,
but she is carrying a three-kg load on her back, it is difficult
to assert that they are racing under equal conditions,'' she said.
''We must eliminate that additional burden,'' she added.
The burden the activist was referring to was domestic and child-
rearing duties, which continue to fall squarely on women's
shoulders in Spain, even in dual-income families.
Chicano Jávega pointed out that most businesses hiring young
people prefer men, due to their worries that women may get
pregnant, ask for maternity leave, and face the responsibilities
of motherhood.
Although both paternity and maternity leave are now available
when a couple has a new baby, ''very few companies look favourably
upon fathers who apply for paternity leave, and the prevailing
'machismo' or sexism often leads fathers who do so to be laughed
at by their peers,'' said the activist.
A spokesman for the other main central trade union, the CCOO,
affiliated with the Communist Party of Spain, told IPS that ''The
Spanish economy is incapable of providing sufficient jobs to those
who are newly joining the economically active population,
especially in the case of women. It is no coincidence that once
more, women are hit harder by unemployment than men.''
But the Federation of Chambers of Commerce, Industry and
Shipping sees things in a different light.
In a communique issued Tuesday, the Federation said the economy
was continuing to generate employment, despite a global slowdown,
and ''The outlook for the next few months is favourable for the
Spanish labour market.
''An end to several international risk factors, and forecasts
of a moderate recovery of the global economy this year, will
enable the Spanish economy to escape negative consequences,'' it
argued.
The Federation has thus maintained its projections of a 1.5
percent increase in the number of jobs this year, and continues to
predict that unemployment will remain steady at around 11 percent.
The UGT, however, disagrees, and said in its own statement that
the figures from the Survey of the Active Population ''reflect a
worrisome situation and evolution of our labour market that can
only merit a negative assessment.''
According to the trade union, the creation of jobs is the great
pending task facing Spain's economy.
The UGT and the CCOO announced in a joint communique issued
ahead of May 1, International Labour Day, that they would continue
''promoting all the measures that are necessary to improve the
employment situation, and to eliminate the precariousness that
takes an especially heavy toll on young people and women.''
The unions said they would also seek ''to improve working
conditions through collective bargaining...to eliminate social
inequality and discrimination of all kinds, whether it is gender
discrimination or discrimination against immigrants,'' the
statement said.
''With the same intensity with which we will promote these
proposals, we will work against the aim to impose new reforms that
eliminate social and labour rights,'' the unions added.
(END/2003)
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