La oferta — The Offer

Why indefinido is the word Alex was waiting for

For an English speaker, a permanent contract sounds like a nice detail. In Spain it is the headline, and Marta puts it in the same breath as the job title for that reason. For decades Spain had one of the highest rates of temporary employment in Europe: around a quarter of employees worked on fixed-term contracts, many of them chained one after another for years. The consequences reached far beyond work. Banks asked for a contrato indefinido before granting a mortgage, landlords asked for one before renting a flat, and a generation of people in their thirties lived with their parents partly because a run of six-month contracts counted for nothing on either form. The labor reform that took effect in 2022 made the open-ended contract the default and restricted temporary ones to genuine cases, and the temporary rate fell sharply, to well under a fifth of employees. Indefinido does not mean you cannot be dismissed. It means the contract has no end date, that dismissal has to follow procedure, and that severance pay is owed if it is unfair. In practice it is the document that makes adult life administratively possible, which is why people still say, with real relief, me han hecho indefinido. Two other details from this call are worth knowing. Spanish employment begins with a periodo de prueba, a probation period during which either side can end things, so the indefinido starts properly once that has passed; Alex will meet it in the next lesson. And the selection itself is often slower and more formal than an English speaker expects, with several interviews and, at the end, a phone call rather than an email. Marta calling at the start of the working day, using usted until the contract is agreed and offering tú the moment it is, is exactly how it tends to go.