Spanish people didn’t wait for the government to announce a recession to get ready to face hard times. Randstad, the temporary work agency, observed, from its own data, that the number of people currently looking for a second job has doubled compared to 2007. This phenomenon had disappeared 20 years ago.

Randstad’ press release highlights that, although the number of job seekers increased by 30% in one year, 10% of applicants were actually looking for a second job. The phenomenon apparently started to grow in the summer, but experts think it should identify in the fall. Applicants for a second job want a job that can match the schedule of their first job: at night or during the weekend or, increasingly, during days off. Randstad says that applicants’ profile are very different. Some have average skills and a stable job. They just want to improve their earnings by taking advantage of their free time when they can’t work overtime. Other applicants are usually unskilled (maintenance agents, call-center agents, receptionists…) Labor market specialists say this phenomenon is isolated, an answer to frozen wages with an inflation rate close to 5% and most loans contracted in Spain have a floating-interest rate, since they are directly linked to the increase in currency prices. They pointed out that the second-job phenomenon, common in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, had totally disappeared since.

Planet Labor, September 16, 2008, No. 080601 – www.planetlabor.com