2016-1-TR181: Texto-Trabajo Parcial

March 1, 2016 11:42 am

The fear and despair of Spains young

jobseekers
Tobias Buck

An entire generation does not know how it feels to be secure in a job

and confident about the future
Spains economic crisis has millions of faces, but it is the young ones that stick in your
memory.
There was the 26-year-old nurse I met in Seville, firing off one job application after the
other, always hoping that this one would finally come good. Or the pale-faced 23-year-old
in Cdiz, without a job and worse without a clear idea of how to get one. Or the two
sad youngsters to whom I spoke in a village near Toledo, hankering after the golden years
before the local window factory went under.
For them, as for so many young Spaniards, the post-2007 housing bust and recession
brought personal devastation. Even today, with a solid recovery finally in place, official
data show that more than 1.85m Spaniards under the age of 34 are unemployed.
One in five youngsters is neither in work, education or training. Tens of thousands have left
the country to look for jobs north of the Pyrenees. Those that do find work in Spain
typically labour in precarious conditions, jumping from short-term contract to short-term
contract, many barely earning the minimum wage.
In fact, the countrys jobs market is not just making young people poor it is making
them sick. Spanish psychologists have been warning for years that the generation that came
of age during the crisis is suffering in ways far beyond income statistics and labour market
data.
Without a safe job, you live without certainty and without security, says Josep M Blanch,
a professor of applied social psychology at the Autnoma University in Barcelona. You
dont know whether you should have children and start a family. You lose the ability to
plan and manage your life: it is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel.
Spains labour market, where millions oscillate between no job and precarious jobs, is a
mental health challenge as much as an economic one. Young Spaniards, says Prof Blanch,

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have been forced to live in permanent adolescence, their path towards adulthood and full
citizenship blocked.
They are more likely to suffer anxiety and depression and, often, a burning sense of
injustice. Think of the typical modern office, where well-paid older workers on permanent
contracts and full benefits sit desk to desk with younger temps waiting for their latest stint
to expire.
You have to be very healthy in your mind to come away from that experience without
negative psychosocial effects, says Prof Blanch.
For some young Spaniards, the lack of stability and the need to keep finding new niches
and opportunities might serve as a hard but useful schooling. Others are certain to derive at
least some benefit from working abroad, even if their exile is by choice. Those arguments
apply to only a tiny minority of young workers, however. For the rest, the Spanish jobs
market is a disaster that is largely unmitigated.
Indeed, to the average young Spaniard the complaints voiced by millennials in Britain or
the US must seem like the stuff of fantasy. Young Londoners grumble that they cannot get
on to the housing ladder; the vast majority of their counterparts in Spain cannot afford to
rent a place of their own.
Four out of five Spaniards aged 16-29 still live with their parents, far more than before the
crisis. Nor do they have much time to fret about their failure to set aside money for a decent
pension. Salaries are typically so low that young workers have to worry about the end of
the month, not the end of their working life.
That is not to say that the concerns of millennials in Britain or the US are trivial, only that
the crisis facing young workers in Spain and other Mediterranean economies is of a
different magnitude.
Prof Blanch is reluctant to speculate on how Spains crisis youth will evolve. There is
surely cause for concern. A generation has come of age without knowing what it feels like
to be secure in a job and confident about the future. Many have remained dependent on
their parents long into their twenties and thirties.
For the past two years, the Spanish economy has created jobs at an impressively strong
pace. With a bit of luck and patience, many of those young people floundering in misery
will get jobs, maybe even safe ones.
Whether they will ever feel safe about themselves, about their country, and their future
is an altogether different question.

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