"More than teaching" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo of a 1-to-1 lesson by ANDREU PUIG]

 
 

Dear reader,

 

It seems I have misled you and that I was wrong about something I suggested in this column last year. 

In an article titled “House closed” that was published in November, I wrote about how across Catalonia the International House chain of language schools folded and this meant that the owners made a decision to sack all 300 employees. 

That left them still only technically employed because they were all being unpaid but also unable to claim unemployment benefits.

 

This was in addition to the shutting of Merit School in Barcelona and several others I used to work for. (I won’t name them here.) 

With these separate closures creating what I saw as a collective tragedy, I inferred – without actually saying it – that from the Covid pandemic, the entire English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) industry was highly likely to get flushed down capitalism’s stinking toilet. Not quite.

 

What is the case though is that teachers who still have jobs are being forced to do more for less.

 

Most people’s idea of a teacher is someone who stands in front of a blackboard or whiteboard and talks at a class. That’s what they see; just as what I see of a nurse is someone who walks into a hospital room and checks on me when I’m a patient. 

Of course, there’s a great deal more to it for anyone in both those jobs.

 

“Whenever two or more are gathered in education’s name” EFL teachers will usually talk about how we are practically social workers/counselors or even a kind of friend to our students. 

This is one aspect of my work that I really enjoy and it’s especially popular in 1to1 classes where some students divulge the most personal things without any colleagues around. Last week, I faced a student in an online class in tears about her recent divorce. I’d known her for two weeks.

 

In the recent past, I’ve also listened to male students confess their infidelities and tell me how they’re hiding ongoing affairs. I’ve had a female student come to class and spend repeated hours filling me in on how her husband manipulates her and tracks her movements. 

These are a few of the more dramatic examples but a normal part of the job is hearing and absorbing complaints about coworkers, bosses, or the government. We are seen by plenty of students as educators but also as people who can be trusted because we’re not a fixed part of their workplace. 

At other times, it seems we’re like travelling salespeople who visit your office to spruik the health-giving properties of the English language. All this and much more.

 

But we are doing more, for less, as I said before. Pay rates have been pushed down even further by ‘client’ companies who dictate to smaller ‘academy’ language schools from what their budgets supposedly allow them to afford in these hard times. 

This financial burden has often been passed on to teachers who, already trapped in a low-paid industry, are being paid an industry standard contract rate of around 15 euros an hour. Before taxes. 

When my family and I moved here in 2006 ago I was being paid 21 euros an hour at an international secondary school. (A house cleaner in Catalonia is generally paid around 10 euros an hour this year. In cash. No taxes but also no social security.)

 

Precious few EFL academies pay higher than the norm and plenty of employers pay even lower, now incorrectly claiming it’s cheaper for teachers to work at home via online classrooms. 

And travel costs for petrol, trains, metro and buses going from the inner city out to Sant Just or Martorell or Terrassa? That’s been quietly forgotten about or scoffed at when requested.

 

I’m also doing more admin for the 5 different companies I currently work for. I have a couple of better paid private classes and I’m happy to have work again after a barren summer. 

But I’m not happy to do at least an hour every day of putting class data into each academy’s separate system. That’s on top of planning teaching sessions or writing student reports: all unpaid tasks totaling up to another hour every day.

 

And here’s a cost comparison for historical context. The price of petrol has gone up by 50% since we moved here in 2006. I don’t think I need to tell you about the jump in costs of rents in Barcelona or the price of electricity going up by 36% in the previous 12 months.

 

More work for less? Oh, yes.

 

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

"So, how was your summer?" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

 

When people ask me this question I’ll be able to say it was unique. I had some novel experiences. 

Because the Spanish government doesn’t seem to have the ability to get its Social Security department to pay welfare benefits properly, I was one of the millions of unemployed who received nothing from them.

Like most private (or non-government) teachers in August I had no income.

This meant that the only state support for my household of three adults was a voucher for 100 Euros that I could spend in our little village’s only food shop. Still, I’m grateful for that. The town council helped.

Of course, it didn’t stop me worrying about the possibility of losing our house. That’s another new feature of 2021 but not confined to summertime.

What else? Well, we didn’t travel anywhere. We couldn’t afford it. Same as last year and the year before that. Instead, I spent hour after hour looking for the best place to sell some of my wife’s inherited jewellery. My mother in law’s gold bracelets paid for some of our mortgage.

I also put some time into a new hobby: persecuting myself and my wife and son to only use electrical appliances during the low-charge periods of the day, 2pm to 6pm. 

Of course, it didn’t work. Our electricity bill has gone up anyway. But we’ve almost stopped eating meat and drinking tea (the real, expensive stuff) so that might help even things out, do you think?

But surely I did something worthwhile? Yes. For my one glass of it a day, I found a bottle of wine I can actually drink that costs less than 1 euro. Also, I kept beavering away on my first novel. It’s getting close to finished. Nice. I watched my son with his girlfriend and I was proud of him. Also very nice. (She’s moved in so now there’s four of us.) 

As well,I walked here and there. It was free. Nice, again. It meant I discovered new patches of nature and parts of nearby towns that I hadn’t explored before: Pacs del Penedes and it’s Roman aqueduct in the medieval shade of a leafy forest, the thickest vines on the side of unfashionable Santa Margarita i Els Monjos and yet more wonderful Roman arches next to Sant Jaume dels Domenys.

All those in silence and with no one else around to distract me.  I went home and learned a lot reading Doris Lessing then dreamed about going to a restaurant again one day. It’s been more than 18 months since we did that.

On top of those fun and games, I enjoyed the heat of the sun. I always do. There was a part of me though that sometimes thought of that melancholy Bob Dylan line. “It’s not like the sun that used to be.”  

In short, while on a reluctant holiday, I tasted the stale, acrid taste of relative first-world poverty, or at least the sensation of sliding hundreds of metres towards it from what was once a comfortable middle-class existence. Surely, this is “The New Adventure” of the 21st century.

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

"A bigger hassle" -- My latest opinion article for Catalonia Today magazine

[Pic: JOSEP LOSADA: Protesters in Barcelona]

Riots, disturbances, protests, brutal human rights violations, night-time shenanigans or “police-community liaison?”

The events that began immediately after the election here in Lleida, Barcelona and Girona (as well as Valencia and Madrid) can be called whatever you like.

But anyone who thinks that it’s all about something as abstract as freedom of expression is fooling themself.

Young and not so young people are marching, chanting, smashing shop windows, looting and doing the now routine burning of rubbish hoppers for much wider-ranging reasons than just the imprisonment of yet another rapper. That was merely a trigger.

Quite appropriately the other day, I was standing, for a change, not sitting, in my lounge room when I watched a young Catalan on Euronews TV intelligently selected by the editors possibly to give a more comprehensive explanation for why he and his friends ventured out into the cold and put themselves at risk of arrest or worse. (At the time of writing, another citizen had lost an eye from a rubber bullet.) 

The young man in a black face mask with both his eyes still good enough to show on camera, made a point that is entirely absent from most media reports and commentary. While all the action was going on behind him, he was intent on saying that Spain is the worst in Europe for youth unemployment, currently still over 40%. He could also have commented on under-employment as a chronic symptom here since the 2009 economic “crisis.” 

It’s no coincidence that some demonstrators focused their aggression and frustration on banks, destroying furniture and equipment after breaking in. As a symbol of capitalism’s failure for the average person there is no better target of what to smash up.

The pandemic has not created record cases of house evictions or already low salaries unchanged for more than a decade. It has simply made the system we live under more punishingly extreme.

One of the most relevant facts also in the background to the latest episode of “hit the streets and get hit” now applies to at least two generations of people.

Those who are my son's age (late teens, up to early 30s and my generation in our 50s) who are available to be “gainfully employed” simply are not put to good or fair use. This too breeds frustration. 

In my own case, for the last 9 months or so of the pandemic, the best that hyper-capitalism is offering to someone like me with two university degrees and two decades of experience in classrooms with adults and teenagers is that all we can hope for is a patchy timetable teaching little kids in China. Online for 10 euros or less an hour. 

In other words, anyone in a job is supposed to consider themselves lucky and be thankful for getting paid peanuts. Especially if you live in Barcelona, peanuts simply don’t pay the rent or the mortgage. That is also why huge numbers of adults under 30 continue to live in the family home.

Equally, there’s one other crucial element that has hardly been reported. The jailed rapper in question (whose name may as well be spelt hassle, not Hasel) has also criticised [alleged] previous torture and death of demonstrators and migrants, aside from his lyrics about the corruption of those higher up our economic and social food chain.

Plenty of local people know that. It motivates them. 

So why is this not being stated in media outlets who can get away with exercising freedom of expression? 

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

"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.)

VIDEO: "Rich people don't create jobs" says multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer at his banned TED Talk

"As the war over income inequality wages on, super-rich Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has been raising the hackles of his fellow 1-percenters, espousing the contrarian argument that rich people don't actually create jobs.

The position is controversial — so much so that TED is refusing to post a talk that Hanauer gave on the subject.

National Journal reports today that TED officials decided not to put Hanauer's March 1 speech up online after deeming his remarks "too politically controversial" for the site..." Via Business Insider."

"Wealth inequality in Spain deepens as poorest get poorer and corporate profits soar..."

"An analysis of tax data in Spain shows how austerity and labour market counter-reforms have slashed the wage share of the country’s wealth to new lows while corporate profits have soared. 


The findings by economist Gabriel Flores published in online newspaper Nueva Tribuna are:

• Labour income has declined as a proportion of GDP from 50% in 2008 to 46.9% in the first quarter of 2017

• Corporate profits after taxes, interest and dividends, have more than doubled from 8% of GDP in 2008 to 17.5% today

• Austerity policies have benefitted high earners but the lowest paid have seen a significant fall in income

• The 650,000 odd Spaniards on incomes above 60,000 euros annually saw a 10% rise in income, the income of the 6 million on less than 12,000 euros dropped by 8% and the 10 million on 12,000-60,000 euros a year increased by about 6%

• Despite high GDP growth rates in 2015-2017 (3%-plus), the trend towards greater inequality among the majority relying on wages for their income has been consolidated

• None of the above data includes the black economy, where low and insecure wages dominate.

Says Flores:

“This strong growth in business profitability, based on the successive reforms of the labour market, has occurred at the expense of lower tax revenues of the state and lower labor income, multiplying social inequalities.

“All the inequality indicators show that, despite the high GDP growth rates between 2015 and 2017, the trend towards greater inequality has been consolidated among the majority that rely on wages.

“To reverse the inequality to pre-crisis levels it is not enough to increase the GDP growth rates; it is necessary to repeal the successive reforms of the labour market approved in recent years and to distance as much as possible the economic policy from the principles of austerity and wage devaluation that have guided government decisions.”

Flores calls for “an inclusive growth model in which the important thing is not the amount of growth but the redistribution and good management of growth to meet the needs of the majority, improve their welfare and secure an equitable distribution of income, restoring the principle of social, territorial and economic cohesion as a guide to economic policy.”

Source: translated at Revolting Europe.

Varoufakis in conversation with Claudi Pérez of El Pais

A fascinating interview with the former Finance Minister of Greece, who (as usual) tells it how it is about Spain, Greece, Europe, the past, the present and the still uncertain future.

"TTIPing us over the edge" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

While we are all going about our daily business this month, big business is going about trying to make sure that Europe is run purely in its interest.

If agreed to by the European parliament, the new Free Trade Agreement between the United States and the European Union, better known as TTIP, will do immeasurable damage to the lives of citizens across this continent. 

The progressive organisation Global Justice believes that it poses "great risks to hard won measures to protect public health, worker rights and the environment."

Essentially, TTIP is "designed to take away barriers which are behind the customs border – such as differences in regulations, standards and certifications" of goods for trade. 

This may sound reasonable but what it means is that Europe would be required by law to have exactly the same product rules as the United States, which are widely known to be the loosest and most anti-consumer protection in the developed world.

The TTIP negotiations have all been conducted in secret sessions - closed to the public and the media. 

The reason for this is simple. 

The leaks of information from the meetings have shown that TTIP would mean that any business could take any government to court if they believed that a government policy threatens their profits. 

This legal method, (known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism) has already led to countries being sued for putting health warnings on cigarette packets, regulating medicine and energy prices, raising minimum wages, and removing tax incentives.

TTIP would further strengthen the power of big business (because only the largest can afford it) to control what national parliaments can and cannot do for their private citizens. 

Fracking, to take just one other example, would be more likely to go ahead because public administrators would want to avoid costly litigation that they are likely to lose defending a decision against it.

On top of all this, there is a fear – from the European Commission itself – that because of TTIP changes up to one million workers employed in small businesses are almost certain to lose their jobs. 

So, if accepted, TTIP may well worsen inequality across the EU.

Meanwhile, according to online global web campaigners Avaaz, “cruel factory farms are pumping healthy animals full of antibiotics so that they can produce more meat, faster and cheaper.” 

They argue that this practise is also creating drug-resistant superbugs but, in a positive development, several European countries have already drastically cut the use of antibiotics, and now EU ministers are negotiating laws to do so across the wider region. 

Unsurprisingly, and in a parallel move with pressure on TTIP, “the farm and pharma lobby is out in full force to stop the new EU laws.”

I would urge readers to think about taking action by signing the online petitions (as I have done) at the websites of the two organizations I’ve mentioned above in this article: Global Justice and Avaaz.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.]

"Abandoned in austerity Spain: no job, no benefits"

"Read the news and it’s all upbeat about Spain.

The Spanish economy grew 0.6 percent in the second quarter, the fastest rate since 2007, before the country slipped into recession. That’s the fourth consecutive quarter of growth.

And Spain’s unemployment rate has fallen to a two-year low – of 24.5% in the second quarter.

Of course at a quarter of the working population, unemployment remains very high, second highest in Europe in fact. And more than half of all young people (15-24 year olds) have no employment.

But the trend is positive, the Popular Party government of Mariano Rajoy argues: austerity is working.

But other, recently issued figures show a different picture..."

Read more from source here.

How the economic "crisis" kills

Photo: Corbis *from source.

On Monday morning a woman committed suicide in the Madrid suburb of Carabanchel, after receiving an eviction notice.

She was only the most recent victim of a problem that psychologists have been warning about for several years : mental disorders caused by the crisis, mainly due to a rapid increase in unemployment, ending up raising suicide rates.

But, even though there have been numerous studies linking mental disorders and economic crisis there had been no fully-conclusive evidence of it.

Until now.

The crisis has made the suicide rate increase markedly around the world.

A new study published in the British Medical Journal this week says that in 2009, the year after the start of the global economic crisis, the overall suicide rate among men rose by 3.3 %, an increase of approximately 5,000 self-inflicted deaths in all countries analyzed in respect to the expected trend. 

 

In Spain, suicides increased by 7.2% more than expected, but only among men, one of the authors of the study, professor of epidemiology at the University of Bristol, David Gunnell confirms.

In the 20 European countries that already have data for 2010, the analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide: 10.8 % more than in 2009.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong , Oxford and Bristol, found that the evidence suggests that the increase in the number of deaths was observed mainly in the 27 European countries studied (up 4.2%) and in 18 countries in the Americas (6.4%) .

They further stress that their findings are "probably an underestimate of the true impact of the global economic crisis on suicide " because some countries data was not yet available.

In fact , in the 20 European states that already have information on 2010, his analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide, 10.8% more than in 2009.

The increase in the suicide rate is particularly high among men in countries where the level of pre-crisis unemployment in 2007 was relatively low (in Spain it was at 8.26% ) .

According to the researchers, this is explained by "the economic crisis and rising unemployment causing more fear and anxiety...and stigma...in countries where unemployment was low, which in turn has resulted in increased suicides."

For scientists, an increase in the suicide rate is usually the tip of the iceberg of emotional distress related to the recession. According to statistics, for every person who takes his own life, about 30-40 try to, and for every attempted suicide a dozen people experience suicidal thoughts.

The impact of the economic crisis on the mental health of the Spanish was investigated by a team of scientists from the University of the Balearic Islands, led by Dr. Margalida Gili.

They published their findings last year in the European Journal of Public Health. According to them, between 2006 and 2010, mental disorders (as seen by primary care physicians) grew significantly. In this period diagnoses of depression increased by 19.4 %, anxiety was up 8.4 % and there was a 4.6 % jump in alcoholism.

The government's austerity policy is causing further loss of jobs, and increasing the risk of suicide, the authors of the study found, but they are cautiously hopeful and insist that this problem has a solution:

"Our findings show that the economic crisis causes a significant increase in suicides, but previous research shows that this risk is not inevitable. Programs to boost the labor market may help offset the impact of the recession on suicide levels, since a successful relocation of the unemployed significantly reduces or eliminates risks to mental health on the unemployment. In times of cuts, countries with limited resources can focus their aid on young men of working age. In many countries, however, government austerity is causing further loss of jobs, which will increase the risk of suicide. Urgent action is needed before the economic crisis causes a further increase in suicides.

My translation from original source here.

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.]

"How Europe's solution for the crisis is actually the problem "

[Youth unemployment rate in Europe between 2005-2013 via Les Crises – public domain]

"Europe's current crisis is more than economic. Between the German government advocating a dangerous austerity policy and European authorities lacking any other suggestions, it is clear that the 2008 financial crisis is no longer solely responsible for the downward spiral of Europe.
The GDP for countries in Europe has fallen by a considerable amount: 5.3% for Greece, 3.9% for Portugal, 4.1% for Cyprus, 2.3% for Italy, and 2% for Spain. This is without even mentioning the recession into which France is entering. In the first quarter of this year, the European Union economy contracted by 0.7%, or one percent when only taking into consideration the eurozone."

Read more from this Global Voices article here.

The generation that is hoping for Plan B

I have an acquaintance who is a waitress even though she has a high-level science degree. These days some people would consider her to be lucky to have any kind of paid work.

"For Spain’s twenty-somethings, the dream was over before it began. Two years after Wall Street crashed, a crisis that seemed far away has now taken over their lives.

Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, and joblessness is most severe among the under 25s. The question people like Iván Miguel, fired from his job as a waiter the day after Spain won the World Cup, are asking is whether they are doomed to a life without meaningful employment."

The first part of an EL PAÍS report on Spain's "Generation in crisis."

Payments to continue for unemployed

Spain's Zapatero Socialist government may at times deserve some criticism but they are (so far) not completely abandoning the unemployed.

News this week is that they "have agreed that all jobseekers whose dole money has run out will be entitled to the monthly payment of 426 euros promised at the end of last year."

This comes at a time when the country's unemployment (at almost 20%) is still higher than anywhere else in the European Union, and is the worst it has been since 1998.