Since the crisis that began in the year 2008, employment conditions for young people aged under 30 have worsened with respect to previous generations when they were of the same age, especially since the labour reform of 2012. The wages of young people nowadays have been reduced to a greater extent than those of their predecessors, as has their presence in the labour market, which has led to serious problems with the stability of their life projects. Specifically, in 2019, contributors to the Social Security General Scheme aged under 30 as a percentage of the total number of contributors had reduced, with respect to the year 2008, from 18.6% to 12.5%. Furthermore, the number of employment contracts per contributor among young people aged under 30 was increased between 2008 and 2019, from 2 to 3.3 contracts.

Since 2008, the unemployment rate among the population aged under 30 has gradually increased, reaching its maximum value, 42.4%, in 2013. Since then, this rate gradually reduced to reach 23.8% in 2019, although this value is still above the 2008 figure. Especially concerning is the unemployment rate of young people with an education level lower than compulsory secondary education, since in 2019 this stood at 34.3%. Another element that characterises precarity for young people is the high proportion of temporary contracts, which in 2019 reached 56%, a figure that continues to be higher than when the previous crisis began, in 2008. Also concerning is the growth in the percentage of contracts with an involuntary part-time working day, which in 2019 stood at 53.4%.

Higher education usually gives access to better remunerated jobs with greater expectations of future career improvements. However, in 2018, some 50% of university graduates in employment aged between 20 and 30 did not even achieve earnings of 1,000 euros per month. Comparing the data from the 2012 and 2018 samples, it is observed that the average duration of the contracts of university graduates has become shorter, reaching an average of 10 months in 2018. 

The wage gap between the sexes has been perpetuated over the course of time, since women continue re-ceiving lower wages than men. In 2018, the difference in wages stood at 17%. Between the years 2008 and 2019, the number of permanent employment contracts signed by women aged under 30 fell by 22% and, in turn, the percentage that temporary contracts among the said group represented out of the total rose from 88.4% to 91.5%. For their part, young women of non-European nationalities earned, over the course of the period analysed, lower wages and their contracts were shorter in duration than those of Spanish women. In 2018, the median wage of women aged under 30 of non-European nationalities was some 29.3% lower than that of women of Spanish nationality while 50% of them contributed to Social Security for fewer than six months.

Precarity in youth employment has intensified ever since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis, especially with the approval of the labour reform that began in 2012 and which affected both access to employment and to contracting modalities aimed at young people. There has been consolidation of a youth occupation model based on temporary work, involuntary part-time work, and low wages, becoming more acute among young people of non-European nationality, those who have not completed their secondary education and, in particular, young women. 

In the face of this situation, it would be necessary a new framework for labour relations which recovers the principle of employment stability, reducing the use of temporary contract models and ensuring quality in offers of employment. Also considered is the need that youth policies promoted should take into account the heterogeneous nature of the group classed as youth and that they occupy a central place in the set of public policies and the achieving of the future welfare state for society. 

CABASÉS, M. À., A. PARDELL and A. SERÉS (2017): «El modelo de empleo juvenil en España (2013-2016)», Política y Sociedad, 54(3), 733-755.

GONZÁLEZ, S. (2013): «Juventud, desempleo y precariedad laboral. La red como espacio para la construcción de alternativas», Revista de Estudios de Juventud, 103, 161-180.

ÚBEDA, M., M. À. CABASÉS and A. PARDELL (2020): «Empleos de calidad para las personas jóvenes: una inversión de presente y de futuro», Cuadernos de Relaciones Laborales, 38(1), 39-57.

ÚBEDA, M., M. À. CABASÉS, M. SABATÉ and T. STRECKER (2020): «The Deterioration of the Spanish Youth Labour Market (1985–2015): An Interdisciplinary Case Study», YOUNG.

VERD, J. M., O. BARRANCO and M. BOLÍBAR (2019): «Youth unemployment and employment trajectories in Spain during the Great Recession: what are the determinants?», Journal for Labour Market Research, 53(4).