I wrote last Thursday that the EPA's Friday of Sorrows would be offset this week for governmental purposes. So it has. The unemployment figures registered in the Public Services of employment (SPE) are a respite. Yesterday was Job Hope Wednesday: 64,309 fewer registered unemployed than in March, more optimistic than in April 2009, when the unemployed increased by 39,478 people. But it also warned that it was not a good time to go wild.

Many new contracts are in the service sector, 75 percent are temporary and are due to tourism. So, in October, at the end of their term, their signatories will return to the unemployment register of the SPE (formerly Inem). The monthly data can be used by the Government to announce an improvement, even if it is temporary and makes employment more precarious. It is welcome, but it is structurally seasonal.

As long as the Government does not take measures, it cannot say that it does not generate unemployment and it does fight it. It generates it because it did not react in time; it does not fight it because it is trapped in the spider's web of deficit and public debt.

That is why it lets the negotiations between unions and employers drag on. Negotiations that resemble the work of Penelope, who unweaves at night what she wove during the day. What are the unions waiting for? Who is their Ulysses? Where is he and with whom does he relate?

Méndez, of UGT, says that nowadays the raids are virtual; that one no longer manifests oneself physically or at the party of work; people chat or tweet on social networks. The citizen (Ulysses) is amused by the siren songs of the Internet and locked up in the cavern of his Polyphemus, that one-eyed giant now called soccer.

That is why the unions weave and unweave the labor reform to see if chance will give them back the trust of their Ulysses-worker who is now looking for another Penelope. Loyalties must be earned.