The special campaign against the underground economy and irregular employment in the Canary Islands, developed between November and December 2023, which had the reinforcement of 23 inspectors and sub-inspectors from other autonomous communities, revealed 281 jobs, in 96 of the cases of employees without being registered with Social Security.
The Minister of Tourism and Employment, Jéssica de León, has detailed in the plenary session of the Parliament of the Canary Islands the results of this campaign, which increased undeclared employment by 39%, control over part-time contracts by 54% and temporary contracts by 17%, and which resulted in 210 irregularities and proposals for sanctions for a global amount of 806,000 euros.
De León has detailed that in that month that the special campaign lasted, 940 visits were made, of which 361 were at night or on holidays, as it is considered that in those time slots there are more signs of precarious employment, even undeclared; and they gave rise to 2,700 actions in the area of Social Security, Immigration and Labor Relations.
Seven beneficiaries of benefits were detected who combined them with carrying out a job, six of unemployment and one a disability pension; also 29 community foreigners without a permit; and 156 part-time contracts were converted to full-time, and 66 temporary contracts to permanent ones.
Of the 210 sanctions imposed, 89 were in the area of Social Security, 66 of labor relations, 26 of immigration and 16 for obstruction of the inspection work.
In addition, 232 requirements have been processed to the companies visited.
The service sector and the underground economy
The Minister has emphasized that this campaign not only has a punitive character, as the inspectors detected an effect induced by prior knowledge of the visits in the form of voluntary regularization of irregular situations, and also by the emergence of undeclared employment a posteriori.
Jéssica de León has alluded to a recent report on the underground economy prepared in collaboration with the Foundation of the University of La Laguna in which emphasis is placed on the effectiveness of special campaigns of this type, but also on the concurrence of socioeconomic factors in the phenomenon of the underground economy and tax and labor fraud.
Among these, she has alluded to the productive system of the Canary Islands itself, with a high dependence on the service sector, which is the one that presents the highest levels of the underground economy; as well as to "mutations" of employment and new forms such as flexible employment, multiple employment or teleworking, in addition to social and cultural factors.
This study focuses on certain groups, such as domestic and care workers, in the service sector in general, in the self-employed, teleworking or internships, which will be the inspection priorities this year, the Minister has advanced.
The nationalist deputy Jonathan Felipe Lorenzo commented that most of the time the need pushes to accept undeclared employment or to promote it - the contractor "is a victim of the system", he said-.
In this regard, the Minister has indicated that "nothing justifies" this phenomenon, which however has "some causes, often social", which require a transversal work between different ministries to offer them "a way out to those workers who believe they have no other solution".
The socialist deputy Gustavo Santana has given "the welcome" to the PP for valuing the special plan that in 2016 "brought to Parliament" the former Minister of Podemos Noemí Santana and then the popular ones "put the cry in the sky" because it alluded to "labor exploitation", which judging by the data of the report, "if it is not, it looks a lot like it".