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.]

"Living the reality" -- My latest book review for Catalonia Today magazine

[Writer Carrie Frais: Pic by Poppy Maidment]

Who are these people? “Immigrants temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than the one[s] in which they were raised.”

 

This to me is a much better explanation than the word expat (or expatriate) which I dislike and so does Carrie Frais the editor of a new book titled “#LivingTheDream: Expat life stripped bare.” 

Her preferred definition of herself and the other ten women who contributed a chapter each is stated in her introduction, inside a publication with a cover photo of broken sunglasses. (It reminded me of Yoko Ono’s album cover for “Season of Glass” showing John Lennon’s bloodied specs after his murder in New York in 1980.)

 

The book explores “grief, loneliness, Brexit, motherhood, identity, belonging, single parenthood, rootlessness and integration” but these are just some of the issues that are ranged over. The nebulous concept of “home” is also touched on in various distinct ways.

 

As an author, Frais focuses especially on the emotional baggage of her relocation. Her timeline of the last decade and a half jumps between London and Cabrils (not Cambrils) in Catalonia and moves between themes of parental illness and death, the power of memory and ultimately the Covid 19 pandemic. Wisely, she both recognises and reconciles her status as an outsider: an adventurous one, open to challenges.

 

Deborah Gray, Managing Director of Canela Public Relations in Barcelona has some specific advice. She finishes her chapter with a title taken from a century old quote from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, saying “exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is: many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

 

Her own life experiences include managing a private life (including children) and running offices in Madrid and Lisbon as well as the Catalan capital. She has been navigating the rough seas of European business conditions since 2006. Gray states, “Don’t define yourself by what you do for a living because it can all disappear overnight through no fault of your own.” Millions across Catalonia and the rest of Europe could relate to that.

 

Mother of three, teacher, writer, designer and Associate Director of MumAbroad.com Jane Mitchell, lives in El Masnou on the Maresme coast just north of Barcelona. Her part of the book is called “Becoming Me (Again)” and talks about how she made happiness a priority ahead of her career. She believes her previous years in Cairo taught her about acceptance and adaptability but didn’t fully prepare her for a new role as a mother in Catalonia.  

 

Sue Wilson of the Bremain in Spain organisation is another highlight, writing about the legacy of Brexit for her, living in Valencia.

 

A great strength of this book is that it avoids most of the cliches that surround those who relocate. In several places it confronts them face on to dispel fanciful dreams and watery eyed romantic projections of Europe as a land of sunny, easy plenty. I, too, think this needs to be done.

[This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine here.]

"They took me to prison:" The nightmare of a young Italian woman at UK border after Brexit

Marta, 24, was supposed to work as an au pair in London but without a work visa, she was sent to the Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre.

"They took me to prison; then I burst into tears..." [Dozens of EU citizens have reportedly suffered similarly.]

Read more from La Repubblica here.

"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.]

"Barcelona’s Epic Tourism Boom Is Over..."

Apart from the great news that Spain is to prohibit the docking of cruise ships ‘indefinitely’ there's the prediction that the crisis well and truly underway in the tourism sector, is going to get worse, particularly in Barcelona.

Some local people are undoubtedly happy about this but we can only hope that the reliance on tourism in the economy also ends. Then I and many others want to seet moves towards other, better paid employment.

(These stories and many others can be found at the hugely informative Business Over Tapas weekly news service. They give me no payment, BTW.)

On beating Corona, a new order and kindness...

[Photo: Lluis Romero]

Author and journalist Matthew Tree's latest penetrating article in Catalonia Today magazine (published under the title "Ringing in the new:) 

"Last month, Maria Branyas, the oldest woman in Catalonia and indeed in the whole of Spain, and possibly in the whole of Europe, hit the virtual headlines when she survived a coronavirus infection at age 113. 

(She had also got through the First World War – during which the ship taking her and her family back to Barcelona from the United States was almost bombed -; the 1918 ’flu pandemic; the Spanish Civil War; and, of course, Franco’s wretched four-decade dictatorship). 

This extraordinary woman, born in San Francisco in 1907 and now resident in the Pyrenean town of Olot, broke the isolation of quarantine by tweeting clear and coherent messages to all and sundry, in one of which she said, re Covid-19: “I believe that nothing will be the same again... You will need a new order, a change in the hierarchy of values and priorities, a new human era.” 

She’s by no means the only person to think that the post-virus world will be completely different from the one we used to be used to. 

For example, Xavier Farràs, a professor at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull University, also sees major changes ahead, such as the ascendance of Chinese-type methods of social control and a huge increase in the number of people working at home. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek agrees that there will be no return to normality, and foresees the emergence of “a certain form of communism”. 

By contrast, a good friend of mine in London thinks that hardly anything will change, except maybe a certain reluctance for people to pay a lot more for a coffee served in a café when they’ve got used to making their own at home for a sixth of the price (and the same goes for any other drink you care to mention). 

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has stated publicly that absolutely everything will go back to normal. 

For what it’s worth, I was firmly in the ’nothing will change’ camp until I stumbled across an article entitled ’Greed Is Dead’ in the Times Literary Supplement by the economist Paul Collier, in which the author points out that ’Economic Man’ – a term coined in the 1950s to describe the type of person who does well in capitalist societies by putting greed and selfishness to economic advantage – is on the way out and indeed, must be frog-marched to the door if the rest of us want to survive. 

Recent studies of the evolutionary origin of successful human communities have shown that homo sapiens sapiens is a uniquely social species that functions best when it’s able to weave a “vast web of kindness and mutual obligations” (Collier dixit). 

In other words, exactly the type of web in which the successful capitalists of today would be unable to avoid throttling themselves to death. In a nutshell, we are genetically programmed to be prosocial, to exchange information and assistance without a profit motive, and to thus develop the ’collective brain’ we call culture, which is essential to future human progress. 

Needless to say, any aberration from this ethical model based on mutual aid is precisely that: an abnormality, a deviation, a mistake. 

Our business model of the past couple of centuries is thus a freakish wrong turn along which those who take it are given a licence to be bad, with fatal consequences: wealthy capitalists, far from being social successes, are as impossible to integrate into a healthy society as are psychopaths. 

These recent discoveries are the result of an increased overlapping of scientific disciplines (by way of example, one of the scientists Collier quotes is a professor of ecology, biology, sociology, medicine, data statistics and biomedical engineering), which have now made it possible for us to take a much better look at the still fairly blurry Big (Human) Picture. 

It could well be that the impact of Covid-19 will finally enable us to see it so clearly, we’ll be able to detect the devil in the details – and deal with him."

(1 min video:) "Covid19 Appeal: Food & vital supplies for migrant workers in Southern Spain"

"Migrant workers, providing fruits and vegetables to UK supermarkets, have been confined to the cramped settlements in Southern Spain where they live due to recent social-distancing laws, often without access to running water, basic sanitation or food.

Ethical Consumer (here) appears to be an organisation that looks to publicise bad business practice. ‘Learn how to use your spending power to help change the world for the better’, they say."

Original source: (the highly informative) Business Over Tapas.

"InfoBarcelona: New labour advice services for citizens, organisations and businesses"

"In response to the current Covid-19 crisis, a freephone number has been set up to handle labour queries from citizens and a new Barcelona Activa portal opened up to facilitate financial support and resources to help workers, organisations and self-employed professionals in the business sector. 

In addition, Barcelona Activa will not be charging rent to any companies housed in its business incubators while the state of emergency is in place.

New freephone number for citizens

The new service offers personalised phone support and is aimed at anyone with doubts and queries which Barcelona Activa may be able to resolve. The freephone number (900 533 175) will be operational from Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 6 pm. Depending on the nature of each enquiry, they will be referred to specialist services and resources.

Points to protect labour rights

While the state of emergency is in place, face-to-face support provided at labour rights protection points at the three district offices has been suspended. The service is being provided by phone and online instead and is available citywide.

• Three phone numbers have been set up: 932 346 122, 932 346 121 and 932 346 120.
• Any of the three district offices can be contacted by email. Check the email addresses and service times here.

Website with information on financial resources

Barcelona Activa has set up a new information portal on financial resources and support provided by all administrations, aimed especially at micro companies, SMEs, the self-employed and workers, who have borne the brunt of the drop in turnover since the state of emergency was declared. The website also provides services for businesses, cooperatives, organisations and associations who request it.

Subsidies for projects from the cooperative, social and solidarity economy

Organisations also have access to an online advice service to present projects from the cooperative, social and solidarity economy for open subsidy calls. The goal of this service is to resolve queries relating to documents for calls from the programmes ‘Impulsem el que fas’ and ‘Enfortim l’ESS 2020’.

Read more from source at barcelona.cat  here.

"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

"Generation Precarious" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Oriol Duran]

I saw the best minds of my generation being dog-walkers or asking ’Would you like fries with that?’”

This may well be the sentiment of plenty of young people under the age of 30 across the developed world. 

Certainly, I include Catalonia, and especially those who camped across Barcelona’s main street of Gran Via and into the public square in front of the University of Barcelona.

Yes, they had other issues too that are important to them: the jailing of independence movement leaders, police brutality against protesters, increasing legal restrictions on free expression, but one of their other three stated aims was “a dignified future.”

It’s worth considering what this means. I see no reason why we should simply ignore the different groups who made up the “encampment”. 

When I visited the area in early November I saw groups of surprisingly youthful-looking kids being politically active. Some were in their mid-teens but were confident and obviously happy to be there. One young woman I spoke to had a makeshift stall that was all about a red plastic rubbish bin and her own writing I read was a vague and confusing attempt at satire. Another group were encouraging tweets as a method of expression where you could win a prize.

It’s difficult to argue though, with much of what the main section of the Gran Via campers have said. 

Calling themselves the ‘October 14 Generation’, their manifesto states, “We are a generation without a future. The generation of precariousness. The one that does not have access to housing, the one that is the victim of a system that threatens the very existence of our planet. We are a generation that has been robbed of the most basic social and labour rights.”

To me, that is all clear and true. Only someone living with their eyes closed could dispute it and in fact the far right continue to dishonestly and selectively use these young people’s sense of frustration and alienation for their own political benefit all across Europe.

Of course, it’s easy to write off the street-campers as just some university student vandals and fire-starters who are abusing the privileges that they’ve been given. 

Sadly, even a great writer and thinker such as Antonio Muñoz Molina (considered to be progressive) did this in a recent article for El Pais newspaper. His comments seem to have at least partly come from jealousy when comparing his own strict upbringing compared to “the academic authorities’ paternal and maternal indulgence” over these students’ postponed exams.

To make a comparison, I originally come from a part of the planet (Australia) where the level of political interest in most of the population, but especially the young, could best be described as minimal. In fact, apathy rules. 

I’m filled with optimism (rare for me) when I see young people taking a strong interest in anything outside their own narrow lives, even if I don’t happen to agree in all cases with everything they are on about. If any protester anywhere uses violence against people or private property then I naturally condemn it.

History has taught us that for protest to gain enough popular support to cause meaningful, long-term, lasting change it has to be non-violent. If that means camping out in a public square and main street, then that is a far more humanitarian option than us attacking each other with sticks. It might even help to foster a future that is less unstable.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2019.]

    

"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.

"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.

"Blurred lives" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Quim Puig]

Without barely noticing it, we are routinely doing two things (or even more) at the same time. 

I don’t mean having the TV on in our houses, as Juan Goytisolo called it, “Spanishing on” in the background like in a typical bar here.

What I continually notice is that our daily lives are an action movie of driving while texting, texting while watching TV, watching while screen-scrolling, scrolling while not listening to our companions.

Without questioning, our species silently changes what we do. Only 25 years ago, the phone had a fixed place in the hallway. Now it’s wherever we go. Some use it to shop at midnight or gamble and simultaneously watch sport. 

We experience a collective near-addiction to the stimulation that technology provides and this means that we are caught in our own man-made bubble of fixation, at work, at home and in between.

Piled on top of this, personal identities are more and more undefined. The more fashionable among us are flexitarian, pan-sexual. What was private is now openly public. We are selfie-supermodels: silicon titty down-shots and dick-picks for the under 30s. 

Even what was someone else’s body can now be yours. There are women you can find wearing hair extensions from an unknown Chinese stranger.

Some do the opposite and cling to identity. I’m my race, let’s leave Europe, get out of MY country, “walls are good things, barbed wire can be beautiful” says Trump, “eat my shorts” says Homer Simpson.

And who still has a 20th century-style job? The blurring of life-lines has of course crossed over into the world of employment. Oh, you’re a consultant? He’s freelance, she’s a temp/intern/trainee and that kid makes big money from playing computer games. The rest of them all have zero-hours contracts.

In fact at this moment in time, my own income comes from seven different sources. I’m a teacher/journalist/translator/author and occasional recipient of parental financial help...at age 50. 

I currently go to how many different work locations? 

Apart from my own home, which is also a workplace, the answer is: 10. That is over five days. Imagine, too, how many more it would be for a truck-driver, a Deliveroo bike-rider, a home-shopping deliverer or an Amazon door-to-door courier.

Added to creeping uncertainty and the old ways being so far gone, across this fragmented society there are “a million mutinies now,” as the author VS Naipual once wrote. 

To unconsciously fight against the disappearance of any real certainty in our lives, internal reactions are made into actions. Gay bashing, wife-bashing, woman-hating, immigrant-hating, Muslim-hating, Jew-bating, tail-gating, restaurant-rating, bomb-making, piss-taking, muck-raking, reality-faking. 

All with the momentum of a mudslide that doesn’t want to stop.

And what are we now scared of? Not the bullies. Plenty of people are frightened of the failed-economy’s victims. People with next-to-nothing: refugees, the homeless, beggars. 

We are not afraid of the unknown (giant multinational companies, faceless billionaires. They are all too abstract). We are fearful of The Other.

One of the ironies here is that as a result of this ‘loss of separation’ and things being so indistinct (possibly because of it) we are probably further away from each other emotionally and physically, even when we eat.

The French are continuing to be an exception to this trend but research has shown that more than one in five [British] families “only sit down to eat a meal together once or twice a week. 40% of them only sit down together to have a meal three times a week.” The average American eats one in every five meals in a car!

All this has made me tired now. I suspect you are too.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2019.]

"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