They're unemployed, not redundant

Spain's unemployed have traditionally received little help or guidance from the state in trying to find a new job or retraining for a different career. If you are out of work, you may be eligible for unemployment benefit for a maximum of two years, depending on the amount you have paid into the Social Security system, and how long you have been working. Staff at unemployment offices are not trained or equipped to help jobseekers, who must rely on either contacts to find work, or scour the ads sections of newspapers and specialist websites.

But with 4.7 million people now jobless - 20 percent of the workforce - the government says it is going to play a bigger role in getting people back to work.

"There is very little mobility in the Spanish labor market"

"We have to start thinking in terms of activeness: that people are unemployed, not inactive. There is very little mobility in the Spanish labor market," says Mari Luz Rodríguez, secretary of state for employment.

The Labor Ministry has announced a series of measures that will be introduced between now and 2013. The first will be the creation of a skills profile that will help job-center staff find the registered unemployed work, orient them toward new sectors, help them retrain, or even get them thinking about moving to a different part of the country, where their skills might be needed. In turn, if the unemployed want to keep their benefit payments, they will have to take an equally active role, by, say, attending training programs.

Implementing this ambitious plan will not be easy. Spain has never enjoyed full employment - even at the height of the construction-sector-fueled boom a decade ago, joblessness rarely fell below five percent. The long-term unemployed, who no longer receive benefits, or those who have never worked, have little or no contact with their local National Employment Institute (INEM).

The Labor Ministry says that it will initially focus on people whose benefits are about to run out, along with unskilled youths and the long-term unemployed.

The government says that it will pay the Social Security contributions of companies who offer the long-term unemployed or young people part-time contracts. In six months time, the Labor Ministry is to unfold its strategy for unemployed people over 55. "The current problem we face is that when people in their fifties lose their jobs, in all likelihood, they will not work again," says Rodríguez.

Next year the aim is to involve disabled people and the many unskilled workers left without jobs from the collapse of the construction sector, most of whom will need retraining. By 2013, anyone losing their job can expect to be given more personalized treatment by their local job center.

To put the plan into action, the government is to hire around 1,500 so-called employment orienteers, who will join a similar number of trained professionals hired over the last two years. At the same time, the Labor Ministry is to involve private employment agencies, who until recently were excluded from public-sector jobs. The ministry says it has copied similar public-private schemes in Germany and Sweden.

Although the unemployed tend to use up their benefits payments before finding work, Rodríguez says that this is not about saving money. "The idea is to reduce the amount of time that people are jobless."

Faced with a sharp increase in unemployment in 2009, the government announced that it would pay those whose unemployment benefits had run out a 426-euro subsistence allowance, but that scheme has just ended. It is to be replaced with a 400-euro allowance, with recipients obliged to attend retraining programs.

The government says that it is going to move away from traditional retraining through state-funded workshops and colleges, and instead involve the private sector more, through work-placement schemes that will give the unemployed experience and on-the-job training.

But until now, there has been little coordination at a national level over the efficacy of retraining schemes. From now on, the government is to outline an annual strategy, with clear goals and objectives. "For the first time, we will have a detailed picture of how many unemployed people there are, who they are, and what they have done," says Rodríguez.