Europe’s workers are famously well-protected by rights and regulations, but the continent’s dirty secret is that they don’t extend to everyone. Countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Portugal have long had insulated insiders who are hard to fire and insecure outsiders who churn from one temporary contract to the next. Inevitably, the young have been most likely to get stuck on the outside: 37 per cent of the eurozone’s under-30s workers are on temporary contracts.
But now Spain — the poster child for precarious work — is trying to put a stop to all that. And so far, its efforts look remarkably successful.
