Orwell's Barcelona, December 1936 (& who really are the "wealth creators") [Reposted]

Standing in a Spanish Doorway: Orwell's Barcelona, December 1936 (& who really ar...: It was at a moment in Barcelona, of this same time, late in December 1936, that George Orwell chose to open his exceptional book “Homage to Catalonia.”

In the first page of chapter one, he describes how the city seemed to him then…

“The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. 

Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all.
 

Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.”

So, Orwell thought that not only could Socialism work but it that it was already working in Barcelona during that time, however brief.

In Orwell's earlier life he had argued that wealthy Britain was only able to exist thanks to coal miners working themselves to early deaths in underground infernos. They were the true creators of that nation’s wealth.

As William Blake outlined, the entire modern world is "underwritten by constant, speechless suffering and that "culture" begins in the callused hands of exhausted children," [to quote historian, Robert Hughes.]

It all reminds me of a line in a song by another Australian expat, NickCave:

"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built."

An ugly truth

 

"The Banco de España confirms that company profits grew seven times more than wages in 2022.

The institution says that companies have transferred the increase in costs to sales prices and have improved or maintained their profitability during the current period of high inflation."

Found at BoT : a great summary of Iberia's news.

(Original source at ElDiario here.)

Rewards for you

Doctors across most of Spain are on strike (Madrid) or planning strikes (Catalonia included: 25,26 january) 

They are protesting the continuation of government under-funding, salary freezes, creeping privatisation and the countless hours of over-work that this neglect creates for them and all public hospital staff.

This is how we as a society are really saying thank you to them for risking their health and lives since the Covid pandemic started 3 years ago this month.

Spain's Basque country and Richard Burton: a tenuous connection but a very real one

 

In this dramatic and poignant speech-like reply to an interview question [between 3:11 - 6:00] the Welsh actor talks about his miner father's unique relationship with The Great Atlantic Fault (or "dark artery"): a  famous coal seam that "starts in the north of Spain and goes under The Bay of Biscay and comes up in northern Wales then goes under The Atlantic and comes up in Pennsylvania."

Everything he has to say is as compelling as any political speech or piece of writing. Even more so because it's dense with authentic feeling.

(But just in case...Here's the equivalent on paper: George Orwell, "Down the Mine.")

"The Game" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Andreu Puig]

Millions of people are now playing it. 

Plenty are as desperate and traumatised as the competitors in The Squid Game, but if you live in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat or Santa Coloma or Sant Roc or La Mina your battle for survival has no entertainment value.

In fact, the game has already started in your sleep, where you are having dreams of persecution and chronic failure. 

Now you are out of bed early to take advantage of the cheapest electricity before the costs jump at 8am. You are in a freezing winter kitchen, dressed in your thin but warmest puffer jacket. 

Of course the heating cannot be put on. Don’t be ridiculous. 

Here is your routine breakfast: pappy supermarket bread and instant coffee with long life milk.

Soon you are standing on a RENFE line 4 train from Manresa heading away from Barcelona out to the industrial areas. 

Then, against the slow-rising December dawn, you are one of the still bleary-eyed passengers who get off at Sant Feliu. 

With the cold knifing into your ears even through your woollen beanie, you and a dozen others trudge along the rough pebbles on the side of the tracks. This means you don’t need a valid ticket. You’ve saved one euro. Something learned in this part of the game years ago. 

Of course, you could have been closer to your destination if you’d got off at Cornella but sometimes ticket inspectors are there, as you found out to your cost: a 100-euro fine that made you cry when you got home.

Today has a new twist. You have a job interview. 

You don’t know the pay rate because it wasn’t specified in the ad. It never is anymore. Was it always like that? The unknown. 

It has so many fingers around your throat. The day feels like it should already be over but you have a half hour march past bland square box buildings and fences. 

The air smells like a sewer but only when the breeze blows the wrong way.

Yes, the game is afoot. It is never not. 

You know there will be different versions of it to navigate. 

There is the one where you learn where the speed cameras are on all your local roads where you reluctantly drive because of the cost of petrol. 

Another is using back roads without roundabouts because your car is not registered any more and the police routinely stop drivers to check. You can’t even drive it in Barcelona in the low emissions zone because it’s too damn old.

The game is getting to the end of the month. 

The games within the game: self-haircuts, self-dentistry, and self-denial: not eating meat and never spending on other travel outside your area. 

And shopping for the cheapest fruit and vegetables where you usually end up buying them from corner shops. Suspiciously, there’s no country of origin label for their produce.

The game is the guilt when every blue moon you buy a beer in a bar, just to remind yourself that you’re human. 

It’s knowing that next month, next year cannot be any better. It is always worse, so it always will be. 

And there will be no Christmas for your child. That is the worst of it.

   

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Dec. 2021.]

A (pre) X-mas story in Catalonia

(Photo: Mané Espinosa)

 

"The sad news for many health workers is that their temporary contracts fell due and they lost their jobs. Now Catalonia has picked up some 600 Andalusian health workers who say they now get better hours and a better contract."

[This story from La Vanguardia originally found at excellent news service Business Over Tapas.]

Working Women Week: Barcelona June 14 - June 18 2021

 

"This first edition of WWW, organized by Barcelona Expat Life, Barcelona Metropolitan, Planet Venus and Professional Women’s Network Barcelona, will be held from the 14th to the 18th of June and will consist of a series of hybrid (online and offline) events, workshops, exhibitions and round tables carried out by experts in their fields.

WWW has been born with the principal aim of connecting multiple organizations to exchange experiences, give support and disseminate knowledge on a variety of topics within the fields of diversity, gender balanced leadership and female empowerment.

A further objective is to connect working women with each other, create empowering synergies and enrich them with the different perspectives and resources provided by selected leading organizations, companies or individuals based in Barcelona and Catalonia.

GENDER EQUALITY
DIVERSITY
FEMALE EMPOWERMENT
LEADERSHIP
EDUCATION & RESOURCES "

For more info see here.

"House closed" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

"Precarious:" a word that accurately describes so many jobs under modern hyper-capitalism.

In Catalonia over the last few months this word has become a sword that is hovering over the lives of thousands of people. 

For around 300 employees at the International House chain of European language schools, “precarious” has come to be much worse than a mere word .

In their Barcelona branch (which operated for 40 years) at least 120 teachers and support staff have lost their positions. 

This is in addition to closure of IH’s other workplaces in Tarragona, Sabadell, Badalona, Terrassa and Mataró. Zaragoza and Palma de Mallorca are also shutting up shop.

Speaking to union representative Duncan Hawthorne, who has worked for IH Barcelona for the last 23 years, he told me he’d expected to stay with them for the rest of his working life. His opinion is that it was a great school but badly run over the years, particularly due to power struggles at the top of the company.

“There’s a lot of anger towards the management and that’s who the staff are trying to hold responsible for the end of the business," he said. "Covid 19 wasn't a major cause of us closing. It was just the last straw."

Duncan believes that employees feel abandoned by the owners of the company and their recent protests outside their former office on Trafalgar Street in Barcelona are evidence of that. He explained that one of the worst problems for employees is that they are currently in a kind of financial limbo, neither being paid by IH nor able to claim unemployment benefits (which for  hundreds of thousands of others, are currently taking up to 3 months to be paid by the Spanish government.)

Duncan also told me that the company is in the hands of a legal administrator but is not yet technically bankrupt. 

Another teacher said on social media, "Many of us have worked for IH over the last 5 decades. Staff left without pay or contracts 5 days before the new school year. Staff continued to finish classes yesterday because they care about their students."

Apart from this, it needs to be acknowledged that IH has stated online:

“The closure of schools is due to a sustained deterioration in recent years of International House's main lines of business, resulting from fundamental changes in the world of language teaching. This downward trajectory worsened, without a doubt, with the crisis caused by COVID-19.”

As someone who has also worked in and for a number of different language “academy” schools for many years, to me, this disaster represents just one of many that are striking this sector. 

This is due to the so-called free-market economy failing to provide secure jobs. The (supposedly temporary) closure of Merit School in Barcelona in July is just one other example.

As long as there are native English speakers in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe giving one-to-one “classes” for a glass of wine or online for under 10 euros an hour -- both common enough -- there will be continuing exploitation of professional, qualified and experienced teachers. 

We are witnessing an ‘Uber-isation’ of teaching and learning in the private sector.

In reality, across our continent there is no law; there is only power. Or at least the power to enforce it. The “convenio” standard that legally exists has been widely abused for years and the pandemic has meant a genuine drop in pay rates. I’ve seen this for myself in trying to find teaching work since August.

So, what do we have in the industry? We have closed houses and open slather.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2020.]

"Where (some of) Spain's agricultural workers live"

A video report from LaSexta titled ‘Between garbage and no hot water in old farm-buildings: the inhumane conditions in which the seasonal workers have to live’.

[Thanks again to the comprehensive round up of weekly news at Business Over Tapas.]

"The pioneering Spanish company where staff work a 4-day week"

"A 4-day week on the same salary has become a reality in Spain at Software Delsol in the southern Spanish city of Jaén...

When it was implemented at Microsoft in Japan, sales increased by 40%.

The company believes that a shorter week leads to less absenteeism and greater staff loyalty while attracting an unparalleled pool of talent...

Established 26 years ago and located in the Geolit Science and Technology Park, the company’s headquarters are designed with both leisure and productivity in mind; more formal customer service zones combine with areas for informal meetings and sofas to relax on, not to mention the gym, paddle tennis court and outdoor pool.

Staff also enjoy free lunches and the company offers scholarships, health insurance and the possibility of working from home as one employee does from Bordeaux, all of which improves the work-life balance."

In addition, the company guarantees a salary hike of over 3% each year –3.2% this year – another unprecedented working condition in Spain’s labor landscape."

Read more from source here

"The Empty Womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation"

 "I often ask my friends how they see themselves ten years from now. We know what we will do next week, but not in three months. Will I have a job? Will I have a home? Will I have met somebody? 

The capacity to predict our own lives doesn’t exist, because the precariousness has dynamited the possibility of visualising our future. 

The dynamics have been configured to make everything last only a short time: buy that which you will eat for dinner tonight, we will see what it will be tomorrow; maybe in one month you won’t have a job; remember that next year your rental contract will end. 

The uncertainty generated by the crisis [of/since 2008] has not only rocked our expectations, but also our most primitive certainties; those that I thought would always exist even when I didn’t have anything material to hang on to: a child, for example. A panorama that doesn’t allow anything but short-term thinking, pure survival. A scenario in which to think about having children causes panic. But not having them, if you desire to, also causes panic. 

This book deals with putting off having children in the generation of the 25 to 35 year olds. Also about those who when they were about to have a child, they lost their jobs. It reflects on the fear of having children and on the fear of not ever having them. A collective tale that talks about how our bodies have been crossed by precariousness. And about putting it all off until we don’t know when."


Above is the publisher's summary of Noemí López Trujillo's, El vientre vacío. Relato de una generación precaria y sin hijos [The empty womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation], 2019.

Source: an excellent blog on Spanish and Portugese literature: Literary Rambles.

"'Where do I go?' EU citizens face legal limbo after decades in Britain"

     [Anna Amato from Italy. Photo: REUTERS/TOBY MELVILLE]

"BRISTOL, England (Reuters) - Anna Amato was just two when she moved to Britain from Italy with her parents 55 years ago.

She has lived in Britain ever since, attending school and university, working in a variety of jobs, and paying taxes. She has always lived in the city of Bristol in the west of England, marrying a British husband and raising two British children.

Like thousands of European Union nationals who have made Britain their home after living in the country for decades, Amato always assumed she had earned the legal right to settle permanently.

But the government didn't agree. The interior ministry rejected her request for permanent residency last year, saying she did not have enough evidence to document her status.

She was devastated.

"You are in your country, it is a democracy, all of a sudden you are told after this time no one knows what is going to happen to you," Amato, 57, told Reuters. "Where do I go? It is really, really scary."

Amato is one of a growing number of EU nationals denied the right to live indefinitely in Britain ahead of the country's departure from the bloc, currently scheduled for October 31.

For decades, Britain's membership of the EU has guaranteed the bloc's citizens the right to live and work in the country. But as Britain prepares to sever ties with Brussels after 46 years, EU citizens must apply for a new legal lifeline to remain, known as settled status.

Under the government's plans, EU citizens who can prove they have lived continuously in Britain for five years will be granted settled status, giving them the same rights to work, study and benefits they currently hold.

But Reuters has spoken to six EU nationals, including a top French chef, who have been refused settled status, even though they should automatically qualify through continuous residency.

Many EU nationals are concerned they could lose the right to free healthcare or employment. Others are worried about how they will prove they have the right to return if they travel abroad.

The fate of EU migrants has been thrown further into confusion by the government's announcement this month that their automatic right to live and work in Britain will end abruptly - and sooner than expected - in the event of a no-deal Brexit."

Read more from source at REUTERS here.

"Spain's coal miners continue to wait for their country's Green New Deal"

"Credit: 

Lucia Benavides/The World"

 "Spain’s government isn’t getting much done these days.

No political party won a majority in the nation’s general elections in April, and parliamentary negotiations to form a new government remain at a standstill. If a new government can’t be formed by Sept. 23, Spanish voters will go back to the polls in November for another general election, in what would be the country's fourth in four years.

One of the many projects on hold is Spain's “ecological transition” — a push to close all of the country’s coal mines and transition to renewable energies, like wind and solar.

Related: How a forest became Germany’s poster child for a coal exit

People in Spain’s northern region of Asturias are anxiously waiting to see how things play out. They’ve been mining there for 150 years. But today, the industry is almost dead.

During a recent weekday at the San Nicolás coal mine, dozens of miners — mostly young men — walked out of their shift around 2 in the afternoon, in a hurry to get home and eat lunch. The underground mine is located in a valley, surrounded by lush, green hills. At its peak, the mine employed around 2,000 people — today, about 200 work there. It’s the last working coal mine in all of Spain.

Gorka Peña, 36, has been working at San Nicolás for nine years. He says his father was also a miner, and he didn’t expect to end up in the trade himself.

“There’s no future here, no youth,” Peña says. “The towns are becoming more depopulated, its residents are getting older. You don’t have anywhere to go, so you have to migrate.”

Last October, the leading mining union struck a deal with Spain’s Socialist government to funnel 220 million euros ($246 million) into the region over the next decade, which would include retraining programs and investment in new industries.

“In Asturias, what we’re asking for and what we need is for this 'ecological transition' to be exactly what it says it is,” says José Luis Alperi, the union’s spokesperson. “That is, that no one be left behind.” "

Read more from Lucia Benavides article at PRI here.

"Sewing a way out of sex work in Barcelona"

"BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sewing makes a welcome change from sex for the 20 women who escaped years of forced prostitution to stitch together a new life in Spain’s second city. 


Paid work - making clothes - is a path back to normality, they say, a way to feel useful, not used, and learn how to fit into society after being trafficked underground.

“Working here I feel empowered, relaxed and happy,” said Fer, a 42-year-old former prostitute from Brazil whose name has been changed as she wished to remain anonymous.

Fer said working alongside other trafficked women in a simple, white, inner-city workshop had helped her move on and put the past where it belonged.

The women busily cut patterns and stitch garments, chatting as they work. Outside is the commotion of the Raval district – a hive of Pakistani grocers, poor immigrant families and tourists who cram the narrow cobblestone streets and mediaeval squares.

Inside is a women-only sanctuary.

The Dona Kolors clothing brand was born in 2012 to help women like Fer regain confidence and start afresh.

The clothes are simple, boxy pieces in linen and cotton aimed at 30- and 40-something women.

It is a social enterprise - a business that aims to do good - that was set up by a local Catholic organization, El Lloc de la Dona, Catalan for ‘Women’s Place’, which has for decades helped prostitutes in this crime-ridden corner of the city."

Read more from source here.

2 min. VIDEO -- The gig economy is killing people'

'Platform workers' are literally dying on the job.
As ever, the working class have to risk their lives for the profits of the ruling class. This is capitalism.

"Slavery 2.0" -- Exploitation in the tech industry to be uncovered in Barcelona this week

 "The Mobile Social Congress (not to be confused with the anti-Mobile World Congress or the socialist side of congress) is coming to Barcelona next week hell bent on promoting citizen awareness. 

This is to be the fourth ever Mobile Social Congress and is to focus on the working conditions and environmental impact of the electronics industry.

“We want to denounce labour exploitation and the exploitation of natural resources stemming from this predatory model of production and technological consumption,” said Laia Fargas, member of the NGO Setem Catalonia which is organizing the event. 

The title of the event Esclavatge 2.0. De la mina a l’abocador (Slavery 2.0: from the mine to the dump) sends a clear message about the objectives of the event, which include: adopting a global perspective on the production and consumption chain through round table talks, workshops and the projection of a documentary at the Pati Manning in Barcelona on March 26 and 27 in the afternoons.

These events will explore how working conditions reminiscent of slave labour appear in factories in European countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic as well as in China. There will also be presentations on repairing and recycling electronic products and data protection."

Source: News at Catalonia Today

"Bread" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

I have never met a baker that I didn't like. Some have even become friends.

That's not surprising considering what they do: getting up early every morning in the sackcloth black of heavy dark and plunging their hands again and again into pliable dough. 

Have you ever actually looked at a baker's forearms? Muscle on muscle on sinew on bone. Sadly though, years spent working with flour 'dust' regularly causes bakers asthma and even lung cancer.

What they proudly produce in the form of bread, the Egyptians call 'aish,' meaning life. There it was also once a form of payment, echoing the modern English slang as bread meaning money.

The Egyptian word reminds me of that old English expression 'the staff of life' with its idea that bread keeps us upright, like a walking stick. (Like plenty of people, I used to think the phrase was the 'stuff´of life. That it is too, of course.)

But I can only think for a few minutes about different languages words for bread (pa, pan, brot, bara, chleb, ekmek, mkate, taro...) before my mind instinctively turns to its joys that first fill the nostrils before reaching the mouth. (Is it unsurprising that some real estate agents suggest that the scent of freshly baked bread inside a house will increase the chance of selling it?)

Ultimately, I am a simple man. I don’t need fancy food to be happy. I require nothing on good fresh bread. Just hand me a slice of quality seeded loaf, a steaming round of pita, a soft and pappy bap, a torn-off chunk of wholemeal rye, a firm circle of bagel, a still-warm bit of authentic sourdough, some yielding Turkish sesame bread, a shiny little ball of French ‘pain au lait,’ a flat disc of chewy garlic naan, a newly-made corn tortilla, a crunchy sliver of ‘pa de vidre’, a crust of wood-fired ‘redondo’ or the nostalgic raisin bread of my childhood. Give me any of these creations and I will thank you from deep within.

Some of my relationship with bread is not quite so straightforward though. Before living here in Europe, we spent two years in Milton Keynes, a new British city of almost a quarter of a million people. 

But our existence there was deprived. At that time there was not one single specialist bakery inside the limits of the urban area.

If you wanted real bread made by an independent baker, you had to drive just outside the city to one of the small, older towns where you could ask a living, breathing person for the good stuff, rather than pick up a product in a plastic bag down a supermarket aisle.

This is a great contrast to the little town in the Penedes where we have lived for a long time now. Less than two minutes’ walk from our house, there's a tiny bakery and if I am lucky and it is not yet sold out, they will have their excellent ‘pa de coca’ or Vienna rolls.

The great challenge I face is limiting my eating of bread to once a day. This is something I very reluctantly try to do to keep weight off but I do often fail. 

Years ago I even bought a bread-maker machine but after a couple of attempts which produced edible bread, I gave up and went back to the stuff that the professionals simply do much better.

[This piece was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2019.]

"Illegal workers in Andalusia: unwanted yet indispensable"

An undocumented migrant poses in ‘Almericien’ shantytown in El Ejido, Almeria province, on 14 January 2019. (Jorge Guerrero / AFP)

"In southern Spain, the far-right party Vox has drawn farmers’ votes with a pledge to deport illegal workers.

‘But I don’t know what they would do without us,’ an African man remarked as he left a greenhouse in El Ejido.

In this part of the sprawling region of Andalusia dubbed the ‘sea of plastic’, shimmering greenhouses lie side by side for miles on end.

This is where Vox got its best results in recent local elections that have led to it sitting in a regional parliament for the first time in modern Spanish history.

And while it did not get enough votes to govern, the support of 12 Vox lawmakers has allowed a conservative-liberal coalition to take power in Andalusia.

One of the mainstays of the far-right party’s programme is a call for illegal immigrants to be denounced and deported.

Riding his bicycle along roads lined with greenhouses, Issa Guebre, 24, says he is paid 36 euros per day to grow melons.But in this area of southeastern Spain, dubbed ‘Europe’s vegetable garden’, foreign workers are an integral part of the ultra-intensive farming that the regional economy depends on.

He arrived last year from Burkina Faso after climbing the tall fence that separates the Spanish overseas territory of Melilla from Morocco.

Guebre says his boss ‘has never asked’ him for any identity documents and that he has never seen a work inspector.

50 degrees

Asked about Vox’s call to deport all illegal workers, he says: ‘I don’t know how they would cope here without us Africans.’

‘In the summer it’s so hot in the greenhouses at 50 degrees (120 degrees F) that even the owner doesn’t come in.’

A Senegalese man who lives in Andalusia, Serigne Mamadou Keinde Diassaka, recently drew attention when he published on Facebook a video seen more than 600,000 times.

Responding to Vox at six in the morning in a vineyard in Albacete, he said: ‘Here’s what we immigrants do: work.’

In El Ejido, population 89,000, Vox got 29.51% of the votes, ahead of the conservative People’s Party (PP) that has governed the town for 28 years.

Vox could even win municipal elections in May, polls show."

Read more from source at Spain in English

"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.)