Young People and the Social Economy: Quality Jobs Aren’t Decreed, They’re Built

Every time Spain’s Public Employment Service publishes an analysis of youth employment in the social economy from a gender perspective, the same ritual plays out: optimistic headlines, a couple of charts and, a few weeks later, silence. In this column I defend an uncomfortable thesis: the social economy is one of the best tools we have for giving young people a stable first job, but it will remain a half-kept promise until we treat the gender gap and job insecurity for what they are, design problems rather than bad luck.

An entry route with real advantages

Cooperatives, worker-owned companies, special employment centres, integration enterprises: the social economy has features that, in theory, fit what a twenty-five-year-old looking for a first serious contract needs. It tends to favour permanent contracts, spreads decision-making power more evenly and, in many cases, roots jobs in the local area, which curbs the drain of young talent from small towns.

The worker-member model also offers something the general labour market rarely gives a young person: a stake in the ownership and decisions of the company from early on. Done well, that is both a school of management and a form of saving. It is no small matter in a country where access to housing and the chance to live independently depend on having a stable payslip.

A gender perspective is not an add-on

Here lies the crux. The social economy has a notable female presence, but that does not by itself mean equality. A workforce with many women can coexist with glass ceilings in management, lower pay in the categories where they are concentrated, and more unwanted part-time hours. Looking at youth employment without breaking it down by sex, working hours and level of responsibility means seeing only half the picture.

That is why I welcome public bodies publishing these analyses with a gender focus. But a diagnosis without consequences is just literature. If the data show that young women enter in similar proportions yet stall earlier, the answer cannot be an awareness campaign: it has to translate into eligibility criteria for funding, equality plans that are genuinely audited, and pay transparency that reaches small companies too.

Fewer showcase incentives, more measurable stability

Hiring and collective-entrepreneurship incentives have been a constant of our employment policies. My criticism is not of their existence, but of their design. A subsidy that runs out at the moment of hiring rewards the contract, not the staying power. It would be more sensible to tie part of the support to the employee’s trajectory: the aid should weigh more when the young person remains in the company and progresses, and it should be evaluated with public, comparable indicators rather than press releases.

There is also a less glamorous obstacle: the administrative burden. Setting up a cooperative or a worker-owned company, meeting its accounting and tax obligations, and justifying grants takes time that young teams, with no support structure, simply don’t have. If we want the social economy to scale, we need to simplify procedures and offer guidance in the early years, because many initiatives don’t die for lack of ideas, but from bureaucratic exhaustion.

My conclusion is simple. Quality youth employment can’t be decreed: it is built with disaggregated data, incentives linked to retention, and environments where creating and sustaining a collective business doesn’t require being manager, accountant and lawyer all at once. The social economy has the advantage of the model; policy now needs to rise to the occasion.

At Zythos Business we see every day how tax, payroll and accounting management decides whether a small project thrives or falls short. We support freelancers, SMEs and social economy organisations so that paperwork stops being a brake: obligations up to date, payroll handled properly and clear numbers for making decisions. When the administrative side works, young talent can focus on what matters: working and growing.