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This paper has two main aims: on the one hand, it provides an overview of recent metropolitan area population changes in Spain and assesses their spatial patterns through a typology and on the other hand, it analyses the impact of the current economic crisis on the aforementioned trends. The main source used is the Padrón continuo, the local continuous registration system providing official data updated every year on 1 January. Regarding metropolitan area delimitation, we have decided to use that employed by the Atlas de las Áreas Urbanas de España and to situate the population threshold at 500,000 inhabitants. Fifteen urban areas satisfied the requirements. Therefore, this paper analyses, for the 2001–2011 decade, population growth and urban expansion in the 15 Spanish largest metropolitan areas. In the first phase, suburbanisation intensified while the areas simultaneously received significant international migration inflows. The latter compensated Spaniards’ exit flows from core cities, which increased their population again. The economic crisis, which began in 2008, and its significant impact on the real estate sector, drew an end to this urban expansion and growth period, as it seems to have slowed Spanish metropolitan area growth and restrained suburbanisation dynamics. Consequently, in recent years, residential mobility has decreased and metropolitan areas have entered a new phase characterised by a reduction of both foreign immigration inflows and Spaniards’ movements away from core cities. Therefore, with few exceptions, urban centres are currently once again gaining Spanish residents or at least have stopped losing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on changes in collective bargaining in Spain during the current phase of austerity. We evaluate how the decentralization and transformation of collective bargaining have affected industrial relations and forms of work and suggest that the policy reforms have led to a deterioration in working conditions and a weakening in collective regulation and trade unions. However, we emphasize the contradictory outcomes, which appear to be drawing the state into new more direct roles, bringing new actors (such as legal firms) into the deregulation of employment. This situation also raises a range of concerns among managers and employers at the repoliticization of industrial relations and generates further challenges to the ability of management and unions to sustain consensual forms of social dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]