Spain has been struggling for more than two decades with a serious problem of abuse of temporary employment in the public sector. Approximately one in three public employees is temporary. A situation that has not been sufficiently corrected over the years and has cost various governments several warnings from Brussels and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Currently, the Executive has several open fronts with the European Commission for this reason. Therefore, the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, led by Óscar López, has conducted an analysis of public staff and limits the abuse of temporality to fewer than 200,000 workers, who have been in that situation for more than three years, among the more than 900,000 who approximately do not have a permanent contract. To mitigate the situation, the department is already outlining a set of measures with the autonomous communities.
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The Executive thus intends to correct the problem and prevent the sword of Damocles hanging over Spain in the form of hefty fines from Brussels for not adequately preventing and sanctioning the abuse of temporality in the public sector. To that cost must be added the resources that the various administrations are spending on lawsuits with thousands of affected temporary workers, who demand their permanency in court.
The State Secretariat for Public Function is already drafting, together with the autonomous communities, a legal regulation that strengthens controls over the abuse in the chaining of contracts. For this, sources from the Ministry of Public Function told EL PAÍS that municipalities and unions are also being consulted. And the design of this package of measures is already advanced, to the point that it has descended to the technical level and experts from the ministry and autonomous communities are outlining the fine print. “We have confirmed that the communities are aware that regulatory measures must be designed and we have set to work,” they assure in the department led by Oscar López.
Among other things, it is being considered to establish a general alert system that notifies those responsible for public staff when a worker is about to reach three years of temporary contract. And, in parallel, one of the solutions suggested by the CJEU in its rulings is being studied: how to establish sanctions for those responsible for personnel management who abuse temporary hiring.
The latter is one of the most thorny issues. The consulted sources specify that where to set the level of responsibility is one of the technical questions that is causing greater discussion with the autonomous leaders. Just to address this problem, three meetings have already been held. “We do not want a hospital manager to be sanctioned because they needed to cover structural positions with temporary workers if they could not do otherwise,” they explain in Public Function. “That is one of the issues we must determine with the communities, at what level to set those responsibilities and the individual sanctions of a public sector personnel manager,” they specify.
The ministry assures it is open to discussing “everything that occurs to the autonomous leaders” because, they recall, “they are the ones with the biggest temporality problem.” According to the Executive’s figures, as of January 1, 2026, total temporality in the public sector was around 32%, after having fallen from 39% in 2023. And they estimate that 38.7% of autonomous employees had a temporary contract, compared to 46% three years earlier. While the state administration only has 4.6% temporary employees. At this point, measures are also being studied to speed up selection processes, which can last up to two years or more. This will require, according to the consulted sources, greater planning of personnel needs in all administrations.
Number of affected
The real delimitation of the problem is another of the issues Public Function is working on. The idea is to be able to send the European Commission an official and reliable figure of how many public employees are affected by an abusive concatenation of temporary contracts. “In Brussels they need to know exactly the dimension of the problem, because only the magic figure of one million temporary workers is talked about and not all of them suffer an abusive situation due to temporality,” they specify in the ministry.
To start, they have begun by defining what abuse is in these contractual situations: “It occurs when the worker performs in the Public Administration, permanently and stably, tasks that are part of its normal activity, and the duration of their contracts exceeds the maximum total duration, the number of authorized renewals, or when the renewal is not objectively justified,” defines a senior official.
Article 10 of the Basic Statute of the Public Employee has set since 2021 a general limit of three years for the interim occupation of vacant positions. Although it also contemplates certain exceptions provided in the norm itself. In addition, in response to the requirements of several CJEU rulings, that same year a compensation for temporary workers upon termination of their employment relationship was also approved. But this is not general for all of them, only for cases where the temporal limits set by law are exceeded. That is, for those who incur in abuse of temporality.
With both elements and, for the first time, cross-referencing data from different statistical and administrative sources (the EPA of the National Institute of Statistics, Social Security, and the Central Personnel Registry serving Public Administrations), they have concluded that just under 200,000 people would have temporary contracts of more than three years. Specifically, the first results of these cross-checks, whose final result will be sent to Brussels “to resize the problem,” point out that from an approximate group of more than 900,000 temporary public workers, 52.7%, more than half, have a contract of six months. Then there is a third (33.2%) who have been contracted between six months and three years; while 12.2% have been more than three years but less than ten; and 1.9% of the staff have contracts of more than 10 years.
The new measures and the transfer to Brussels of an official figure of those affected by the abuse in temporary hiring will complete the action plan to reduce the temporality rate approved in 2021 by the previous Socialist Executive, with Miquel Iceta at the head of the Ministry of Public Function. This plan, in addition to setting the general limit of three years for temporary contracts, except for exceptions for longer programs, and establishing the aforementioned compensation, set the limit for structural temporality at 8%. To reduce the level to that percentage, it articulated extraordinary stabilization processes aimed at stabilizing temporary positions.
However, the general temporality rate of the public sector managed by the Government has only dropped from 39% to 32.7%, despite the fact that since then the Administrations have offered 556,355 stabilization positions. Of these, 530,914 have already been called, and they have meant that 440,000 positions have already been stabilized, according to the figures managed by Public Function. The problem is that communities, municipalities, and universities, while stabilizing those positions, continue to maintain some temporary workers and hire others to fulfill the provision of public services.
Waiting for Brussels
In this scenario, the Executive is waiting to know the decision of the European Commission regarding the open fronts with Spain for determining that its legislation does not adequately prevent and sanction labor abuse in the public sector. This consideration led Brussels to suspend a year ago the payment of 626.6 million euros from the recovery plan linked to the fulfillment of milestone number 144. This is precisely the one that required Spain to adopt effective and deterrent measures against the abuse of temporality in public employment.
Although the Commission gave Spain six months to correct the situation and unblock these funds, a period that expired last January, sources from Public Function assure that they have continued negotiating and are awaiting Brussels’ response to the allegations presented to try to recover this money.
On the other hand, at the end of April the Commission reactivated two infringement procedures against Spain: one for considering that the compensation provided does not serve to redress the damages of public employees affected by this abuse; and a second, for the discrimination that this implies compared to private sector workers. Specifically, on April 29, Brussels sent the Spanish Government two reasoned opinions demanding a legal reform that corrected the problem within two months. Otherwise, it would take Spain to the European courts, which could entail a sanction and hefty financial fines.
However, before the deadline expired, the Executive requested more time from the Commission, until next March, to continue working on the solution and thus prevent Spain from being sued before the CJEU and fined by this court. Public Function indicates that they are waiting to know if this extension has been granted and under what conditions, but just in case, they are advancing with the communities on a regulation that convinces Europe once and for all that the Spanish Administrations take the abuse of temporality in public hiring seriously.
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