Spains’ economic situation is more that scary, prices are going up, banks are not giving credits what so ever, the housing crisis has affected us deeply and the unemployment rate has increase up to 2 million people (we are 44 million in the country and I doubt we all can work. This is the highest rate in 10 years). This is overall a dammed mother fucker crisis, there are no other definitions.
As always I’ve been reading the papers this morning, and things do not look good, and my main fear is the unemployment rate. But, why Spain has such a high number of unemployed people? The government has started to move and has recommended companies not to hire people from foreign countries. But is that the solution?
From my point of view, the main problem we have in Spain resides on the fact that people from my generation (the 80s) are weak. Let me explain myself:
Lets first introduce the situation: In Spain there are plenty of jobs, 35.000 people are needed to recollect strawberries, and that is just strawberries!!! The INEM (which is the Spanish Job office) has 800 interviews per day (just Spaniards) for the positions. Out of those 800 people per day just 8% showed some kind of interest (that for a Spaniard means saying, well if I’m about to die and I really really need the job… I would take it) and only 2% said they were interested and ready to work!!!! That means that out of 800 just 16 people were really interested, and of course not all of them will get the job!!!!!. This means that if the government does not allow to hire people from Latin America and Morocco (which are countries were most of our workers come from) we wont have people to do those basic jobs… In Spain in general there are what we call lots of low profile jobs, that is, cleaners, mechanics, electricians etc… Which mean that we shouldn’t have such a problem.
The problem relies on the people of my generation, we are all weak, we all have gone to University and have a degree or more. On top of that we have a really good quality of live. The average family has more than one home, one for the holidays and one for the everyday living, we have more than one car and all the gadgets we want… and all that is paid by mummy and daddy. With this environment it is not a surprise that the kids from my generation do not want to have a hard work where you have to wake up early and you cannot pay the type of life you were having.
If the Spaniards between 20 to 35 do not want to get those jobs it should not be a surprise we have such a high rate of unemployment!!!! if on top of that we add that we cannot have people from abroad taking this positions, the crisis will be even worse.
It is interesting that this is happening in the country which had the biggest amount of emigrants(do not confuse with immigrant, an immigrant is a person from abroad in your country, and emigrant a person from your country that leaves the country for a better life. An Cuban is an immigrant in the USA and an emigrant in Cuba) in Europe after the WWII when most of the Spaniards left to Germany, France or Argentina. I hope the goverment changes its mind and they take other type of measures and speciall that we do not ave racist problems, we have never had problems with immigration because when we got immigration we always had pelnty of jobs, but now is a different story….
