Second generation reform of the Spanish labour market: Incentives to the «entrepreneurial spirit» and return of the «magic thinking»

Abstract

The RDL 4/2013, February 22, measures to promote employment and self-employment for young people take part of a true diagnosis: «youth unemployment» in Spain is a «structural problem», that if the crisis deepens, but in absolute terms creates, unlike what happens in other European countries –Italy, Sweden– where youth unemployment triplicate overall unemployment. A structural problem can be solved only with structural reforms. The new rule is intended to generate the belief that this is something it is going to do, so it tries to uncheck the Law 3/2012, dubbing it «second-generation reform», as if the name you would in itself the magic to change the reality.

But, as often happens with everything that implies «second parties», once again the «promised paradise» in the preamble does not correspond with the given reality. On the contrary, compared to the illusion of an institutional framework for a new era cultural and socio-economic, more evolved and modern, based on business innovation and the youth qualification, we found the disappointment of the eternal return to the solutions of the past, reaffirming the business culture of the favour by the temporary hiring. It does not encourage entrepreneurship but the self-employed, and is not advocating more and better opportunities for youth employment, but that opens a wide range of sub-modalities labour contracts of all kinds, whose raison d'être is unique and the same: insert in the labour market to young people during a certain time, in hopes of change in the economic cycle.

With this perspective, here is a detailed study of each and every one of the incentives contained in the RDL 4/2013 both to the self-employment among young people as regards to the recruitment of young people. The authors expose the new conditions of use and the problems are detected applicative, providing solutions. There is also space for a new type of recruitment of intergenerational solidarity in which it is the young entrepreneur which offers the opportunity of employment to the mature worker, with what connects also with the RDL 5/2013.