One in four public employees working in Malaga province is temporary or interim

This summer, Brussels cut the European funds it transfers to Spain for failing to comply with several reforms included in the country's recovery plan linked to the EU's Next Generation funding scheme, which were approved to boost the economic recovery of the EU after the Covid pandemic. Among the milestones the EU executive believes have not been achieved is the reduction in the temporary employment rate in public bodies, which the Spanish government intended to tackle by converting temporary workers into permanent civil servants, a process that should have ended on 31 December 2024 and whose result seems rather disappointing. For this reason, the cut in the latest EU transfer to Spain was 626 million euros. Furthermore, the failure to approve the tax increase on diesel has cost the country another 460 million euros. As a result, the latest transfer of EU resources has amounted only to some 24.14 billion euros.

The EU executive ruled that the goal of reducing temporary employment in the public sector has not been met by Spain, shortly after the department headed by minister Óscar López had published the half-yearly bulletin with data on personnel working for the public sector. After this document was published, SUR estimated that the number of temporary staff in Malaga province had been reduced by 4,000 as a result of the stabilisation process, falling from around 18,700 in January 2023 to 14,808 in January of this year (the latest date for which data is available).

However, to this situation for workers on temporary contracts we must add another, that suffered by people who, in the statistics of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service, appear explicitly as temporary or sporadic workers. According to the latest data in Malaga, these number more than 7,000, but stood at over 9,700 two years earlier.

This means that a total of 21,818 people do not work on a stable basis for the public sector in Malaga. So if, according to the latest official statistical bulletin, the total number of staff employed by central government, regional government and local councils is 89,301, this means that 24% of the workforce is not in stable employment, which means one in every four workers.

These are all aggregated data on people employed by the three levels of government (local/provincial, regional and state) in Malaga. So, let's look in detail at what is going on at each level. The one with the largest number of employees is the Junta with a total of 56,207 workers, followed by the local councils and Diputación (Malaga's provincial authority) with 21,279, while central government employs 11,815 people in the province. This explains why the bulk of the interim workers, 12,914 or 87% of the total, belong to the regional government. The interim vacancy rate for Malaga is close to 23%. Moreover, the majority of these temporary staff, 8,539, are employed in the health sector, which employs around 24,000 people in total. The second sector with the highest number of staff on temp contracts is non-university teaching, with 3,838 out of a total of 22,390 employees. Meanwhile, there are around 140 in the departments for justice and the universities and another 260 in other departments.

In the province's local authorities, the number of temporary staff according to the latest available data is 1,742, representing 8.2% of the total number of staff. The majority are employed by municipal councils and their agencies, compared to 513 employed by the provincial authority.

Finally, central government employs 152 temporary staff in Malaga province.

There is another form of temporary work in Spain known as 'trabajo eventual'. This is not the same as being on a temp contract that is renewable, as the work could be for a definite, one-off period, or sporadic, interim employment. So, what are the figures for these types of temporary workers? The Junta has 3,286 such temporary workers (about 6% of the total), the bulk of whom - 2,060 - are employed at the University of Malaga. Meanwhile, local authorities employ 3,542 temp workers (representing a temporary employment rate of over 16.5%), the bulk of whom are employed by local councils. The number of temporary staff employed by the state public sector in the province is limited to 182 people. Although it is central government that employs the least number of these temporary employees, it is the only one that has more such staff than two years ago, when there were 160. Meanwhile, the number of these employees in local bodies has fallen by 2,181 and in those that the Junta has in Malaga, by 548, mostly in the health sector, where the number has fallen from 377 to 164.