The fear and despair of Spain’s young jobseekers

March 1, 2016 11:42 am

The fear and despair of Spain’s young jobseekers

Tobias Buck

An entire generation does not know how it feels to be secure in a job and confident about the future

A pedestrian passes a sign outside an employment office in Madrid, Spain, on Wednesday, April 3, 2013. Spain's government is waiting for the result of negotiations with the European Union on its budget deficit goals before deciding on its tax policy for 2014.

Photographer: Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg©Bloomberg

Spain’s 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 Cádiz, 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 country’s 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 Autònoma University in Barcelona. “You don’t 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.”

Spain’s 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, 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.

The crisis facing young workers in Spain and other Mediterranean economies is of a different magnitude

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 Spain’s 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.