High youth unemployment in Spain, for how long?
The world economic crisis which collapsed in 2008 is still alive in some south European countries. These nations are facing its consequences and fighting to get over it for 6 years already. Spain is one of those countries, with Portugal, Italy and Greece, which hold a high unemployment rate. Actually, these four countries have even been called PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain), an acronym referring to their economies but with an offensive sense.
I am from Spain, so I will talk about my experience as a Spanish young. Spain is the country with the highest unemployment rate at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It has passed 6 years since the crisis started and we still don´t know when the situation will change.
Every country has a different social, political and economic background, that´s why the crisis is different in each one of them. In Spain, the situation is this way not just because of the world financial crisis but also because of a concrete problem, the ‘Spanish property bubble’, referring to a speculative bubble in the real estate market in Spain. Both crises ended up with the destruction of 3.8 million of jobs.
So far the government’s measures and the politics which come from the European Union are not solving the problems at all. In some cases the situation is even worse because of the welfare cuts taken by the government, ruled by the Popular Party (PP), the high corruption level and the bank privileges.
The main consequence is the increase of poverty because of the high unemployment rate. It was 23.7% in 2014, which means that 5.4 million of the active population don´t have any job. The rate is even worse, if we talk about the youth, because 55% of people under 25 years old are unemployed. But some of the jobs of the employed people are precarious and they have difficulties to survive because of the decrease of the salaries.
The result: young people who don´t have any salary and who sometimes are forced to leave the country and move abroad to try to find a job in any professional category. I mean any job,
anything which will allow yourself to survive, even if you have been studying your whole life for nothing.
For this reasons, some Spanish groups are usually protesting and organising demonstrations that so far don´t have any positive response from the government. Actually, from now on doing
demonstrations can be harder because, according to a new law which was recently approved by the Congress and has to go through the Senate, protesters can get heavy fines, if they take part in demonstrations. But not just because of that. This new law is full of unfair measures which restrict freedom of expression and another citizens’ rights.
The next steps right now are to keep going with fair claims, don´t miss hope and wait until the end of the year, when the elections will take place and some other political forces can possibly break down the absolute majority which the current government has.
Isabel Barragán Vera
