The executive vice president of Exceltur, José Luis Zoreda, has announced that they will request the extension of the temporary employment regulation files (Erte) until “this nightmare of the pandemic ends”, since “the most affected sector is tourism “.
Zoraida has also requested direct aid to companies that “are viable” due to the impact of the omicron variant, which “has affected the month of December and will do so in the following months of January and February.”
According to data from Exceltur based on the statistics of the ministries of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, and Labor and Social Economy, tourism employment closed the year 2021 with a decrease of 7.1% compared to December 2019, unlike the growth of 2.9% for the rest of the sectors of the economy, which meant 135,000 tourist jobs that “we're still affected” in December.
However, by not having official data on the workers who were still in Erte in November, Exceltur has indicated that they cannot make monthly comparisons, but the trend is “a continuation in the reduction of the contraction of employment, since in October 2021 was in a fall of 11%, that is, 224,000 tourist workers affected “.
Of the 135,000 tourist jobs affected in December, 57,000 were people in a situation of Erte, which represents 45% of the total Erte of the entire Spanish economy. On the other hand, the reduction in the number of affiliates was 78,000 compared to December 2019.
In December, the catering (-5.4%) and leisure (-1.4%) branches are the ones that come closest to recovering their pre-pandemic levels, although they are still below, derived from their lower dependence on purely tourist activities.
The subsector that reported the greatest drop in employment was accommodation, which went from having a 17.1% drop in employment in October to a drop of 11.3% in December.
Finally, the branches with the highest amount of affected employment continued to be travel agencies (-33.3%) and air transport (-21.9%) in the last month of 2021.
