Eva didn’t know it, but she has an illegal contract. A contract that makes it difficult for her to go on unemployment every summer, when according to the regulations this should not happen to her. Eva is a teacher in a private school all year round and is a permanent teacher, contrary to what her agreement establishes. Eva is one of the 246,535 people who work in education and lose their jobs at the end of the school year – including 70,000 in the public network.
The education sector is, by far, the one that generates the most unemployment in the summer. More precisely, the private part of education, although the public sector is no stranger to this seasonality. Every year, tens of thousands of education professionals take to the streets at the end of classes to be rehired in September. These are teachers, both in schools and academies, after-school supervisors, cafeteria guards and other similar profiles who move around educational centers, who, when they see the students leave in June, know that their payroll goes with them. The luckiest will find themselves unemployed; others will have to make ends meet until the fall.
Education is a contradictory sector. The idea has permeated large layers of society that teachers enjoy several months of vacation per month and fantastic working days that end at noon. But, besides the fact that these beliefs are wrong, there is a hidden side installed in a certain precariousness of those who are not civil servants, who suffer from seasonality, which manifests itself every summer. And on many occasions, the unions denounce, they do so in violation of the law.
With them, in public schools, they are no strangers to this problem. Despite the agreement reached with the EU to reduce temporary work to 8% and the competitions held this year to improve the stability of teaching, the majority of communities have not yet reached this figure and temporary work reaches 25% (if not more) of the models. And in many regions, the Ministry of Education still fires every summer the trainees who have not been able to work more than 5.5 months during the training. For them, it is almost worse than their private colleagues, because they will not repeat their destination and it is very likely that they will join a new center on the last possible day, with the course already started and the obligation to catch up as soon as they can. “It’s like changing companies every year,” explains one of them.
In total, 246,535 people were removed from the Social Security affiliation lists between June and August of this year. In the last month of vacation alone, there was a decrease of 72,383 professionals in the sector – the highest figure in 15 years – as published by the Ministry of Labor last Tuesday. The problem is not new, but it is not improving either.
In other words, last summer, 6.6% of education workers lost their jobs, a figure that has been more or less constant over the years. But as more people work in the sector, more people find themselves unemployed each summer. The 246,535 seasonal unemployed people registered this year are 41% more than the 174,538 a decade ago.
Of all the contributors who lost social security between June and August in education alone, 86.1% work in the private sector. And within this group, the majority had a permanent contract (they are not technically unemployed, but they stop contributing), as this graph shows.
The problem, explains Pedro Ocaña, secretary of private education at CCOO, is that many of these permanent discontinuous employees who find themselves on the street do so against the law because the agreement on private education – which was also recently renewed with the signature of employers – expressly prohibits structural teaching staff in private schools from having this type of contract. Article 17 bis, which regulates the cases in which this formula can be used, allows little interpretation: “Group I personnel, teaching staff, cannot be hired under this modality to teach school activities.”
Furthermore, there is at least one ruling by the Supreme Court and another by the National Court that have just reinforced this procedure. “The limitation of the use of discontinuous permanent contracts to teaching staff who teach curricular activities is legitimate and justified, being proportionate to the purposes pursued, such as the search for stability in the employment of said person”, argued the judge of the AN. It does not matter, it continues to happen, as the sectoral unions maintain and the data is strengthening.
Eva didn’t know that. She is the paradigmatic profile of someone who finds herself laid off in the summer. She is a teacher in a private school, an activity that she supplements by teaching in an academy. At school, he has – like all his classmates, he points out – a discontinuous permanent contract. Every summer, they lay her off in July – she has to register as unemployed – and rehire her in September.
“The first thing is that two months a year I lose 30% of my salary [en el paro se cobra un 70% de la base reguladora de cada persona, hasta un máximo]. In addition, the SEPE pays until September, so you have to draw on (and have) savings, he continues. This also has other implications in your life, less common but just as real. “I’m moving and when I presented the papers for the apartment, I was unemployed,” she says, which, even if it is not her case, could have had consequences. “They also refused me a European health card ‘given my situation’,” he adds.
Despite this, Eva continues, the 2021 labor reform has improved their situation. Being permanent gives her some peace of mind, because in September they will call her back to teach, she says. And he has noticed it especially in his other job, where he changed his old temporary contract for a discontinuous CDI, which gives him “more stability, the other one was a disaster.”
September is now approaching, and most of those laid off this summer will be back on the job. The statistics also say so: Every fall, more jobs are created in the sector than were destroyed in July and August. Eva says that while she is “happy” at school, her employment situation is a recurring topic of conversation with her classmates, who observe with some envy that the charter school teachers have full rights and paid vacations. One day, he hopes, his school will request the gig and it will be his turn, too.
