"The new nomads" -- Spain's young people

   "Spanish society has got an outstanding debt with its young people, who can’t construct a personal and professional life..., who don’t have decent jobs and salaries, don’t have adequate housing and can’t start a family.

The last decade has been witness to how the concept of “mileurista” [somebody earning 1,000 € a month] has passed from being derogatory to being an aspiration.

A recent study by [the trade union organization] Comisiones Obreras with the title “#GeneraciónMóvil” [mobile generation], shows the following: unstable and unpredictable personal and career paths, always conditioned by low salaries, unbearable rates of temporality and a rotation that turns the young into nomads in the labor market: from one sector to another, from salaried to self-employed, from victims of undesired partiality to false interns, with imposed stopovers in unemployment or abroad, without safe horizons nor the least capacity to plan life projects in the medium or long term, without security...

In 2017, 66 of every 100 young people had a temporary and/or part time contract; and still worse, 20 of every 100 salaried young suffered from double precariousness (temporary and part-time contract). Only 34 of every 100 had a fixed full-time contract...

Lastly, emancipation: 81% of the young between 20 and 24 years, 53% of those between 25 and 29, and 24% of those between 30 and 34 years still live with their parents. … leading to a lower birth rate, as they have their first child later or can’t afford to have children at all.

[…] many young people are deprived of the opportunities they should have had: the right to live their own life independently has been snatched away from them, to take their own choices, forcing them to accept, in the best of cases, any job, to work at any price, to study what the job market dictates to them and not that for which they had a vocation, or to return again and again to their family’s home, hiding their frustration."

SOURCE: Joaquín Estefanía's article: “Ideas,” El País, Dec. 30, 2018, p. 8 [printed edition] (Originally found as excerpts here at LITERARY RAMBLES blog.)

"Why Europe?" (My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine)

 (Photo from Desmontando Mentiras, Global Voices online.)

 [A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today, January 2014.]

Europe exists.

It is certainly under great pressure as an economic group (and therefore also as a political construction) but the past has shown that, as an idea and an ideal, Europe exists.

When I first came to continental Europe I quickly fell in love with this part of the world. I was only 25 but after three months of continual travel I realised that Paris, Berlin, Prague, Italy and Greece made my then hometown in Australia seem ridiculous in comparison, even though it is a capital city.

Sometimes it takes someone who originally comes from outside a place to recognise its worth – someone who does not take it for granted that there is very different kind of life away from shopping malls and quiet suburban streets. 

In Europe, I found defined culture, vibrant history and a sense that the twin Australian priorities of sport and making money are often a very distant second to more sophisticated concerns across Europe. 

In Australia, to call someone an intellectual is typically to insult them for being pretentious. But over here, a writer is generally regarded well and the creative arts have always had a place of broad respect, which is exactly why they are attacked by those in power who are threatened by their satire and criticism. They are important enough to be attacked.

I accept that people are proud of their own cities and countries and I readily acknowledge the differences between them. 

I also believe that (apart from all we have in common as human beings living and striving on this planet) there is a great deal that those of us who live in southern and western Europe share, especially when you think of Mediterranean Europe. 

Here, I mean the (relative) similarity of the food, the central importance of family, the great tragedy of wars and re-building from destruction. Europe has been it's own worst enemy but it is a family of states who have more in common than it's people often want to admit.

There is a darker side to Europe though, and as ever, it is institutions that are failing the people. 

The faceless, unelected individuals of the European Central Bank (ECB) have told Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy what to do and he is happily doing as they say.

The ECB wants further wage cuts and the creation of "mini-jobs" to “address the issue” of youth unemployment, in exchange for buying Spanish government bonds. These "mini-jobs" would pay salaries below the minimum wage, which in Spain is 541 euros a month. 

Not long ago Rajoy told union leaders that he would also use the letter from the ECB as a “road map” for policies aimed at ensuring that Spain remains in “the vanguard of the Euro zone.” Sadly, this is just one of the latest steps in turning Europe into a low-wage “zone.”

Despite this, there is still popular opinion across the wider region that Europe is worth being part of. 

As I write this, thousands of pro-European protesters in Ukraine are facing more government violence against them. They are reported to be angry at the government's last-minute decision not to sign an association deal with the EU, and instead form closer ties with Russia and China.

Europe continues to exist as a progressive ideal but, in some senses, this ideal has begun to seem like more of a dream than a reality.

 

What is "the crisis?" - My latest article in Catalonia Today magazine

(Photo: Javier)

This so-called crisis, which would more accurately be called a “depression” is a thousand varied things that need never have happened.
 

Despite the occasional sensation that life is just continuing on very much as before, the crisis here is certainly the more obvious things that many of us see when we care to look: more beggars on the streets, long queues in shoe repair shops, the recent appearance of solitary men selling tissues or cigarette lighters on the trains and Metro, a greater number of empty shops for sale or rent (or replaced by cheapo-import Chinese shops) and it is also reading more socio-political graffiti on walls. 

The crisis is a European-wide failure of institutions like the financial system and the pathetic political response to it, but it is also a very immediate, local phenomenon. 

In the small town where I live, three years ago there was both a bank and a restaurant – now there is neither.
 

As well, there are the abstract statistics that simply cannot put a human face to this tragedy - day after day of grim, sullen economic news. 

Three months ago, a newspaper headline stated that “60% of Andalusian children live in poverty.”

This sounds remote and abstract until we learn that there were children in Catalonia who were still going to school in July just to eat lunch, and they had to do this because it is next to impossible for their parents to provide daily meals at home.
 

But the crisis is about work too. 

It is hearing that another man has lost his job, or finding that your wife's job has been cut in half and therefore her income has also been halved. 

It is thousands of workers still lucky enough to have a job but not being “lucky” enough to get paid for their labour...for yet another month. 

And it is the insult of “mini-jobs” - (the underpaid mileurista is seeming like the one who is well-off) or it is listening to people at a café talking about the benefits of learning Chinese or German, ahead of English.
 

As well, the crisis is the news media being full of corrupt, cowardly politicians talking about everything except what could end the crisis. 

For thousands of people not in the aptly-termed “political class”, it is a rapid or a gradual descent into poverty – what George Orwell called “the crust-wiping,” - that constant search for ways to save money but still ending up unsatisfied after you eat. 

On top of all this, the crisis is that all-day sensation of being unpleasantly squeezed by the invisible forces of debt, a permanent unconscious burden that is carried by the unemployed and under-employed when a family has no genuine bread-winner.
 

But what is it that has saved this country from violence, riots and social disturbance on a grand scale? 

The family. 

The extended family, acting as helpers, carers and givers of money, love, and as many kinds of assistance that you can think of. 

Without this blood-linked stability across Mediterranean Europe, things would surely be even worse.
 

Sometimes, when I have thought about the crisis I have been reminded of a Bob Dylan line about how the sun starts to shine on him.

 But then (in a single phrase that could speak for millions of Europe's economic victims) he sadly sings “but it's not like the sun that used to be.”

[A version of the above text was first published as an opinion piece in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2013.]