A Spaniard friend of mine was expressing her frustration about salaries and independent living in Spain. Basically, she thinks it is almost impossible to get a job that will pay enough to get your own place or to be totally independent from parents or roommates. And here we are not talking about people in their early 20's but people in their late 20's and 30's. So she sent me this article titled something like "The Thousand-euro Generation". The article is very eye-opening as to the situation of young professionals in Spain.

La Generacion de los Mil Euros

All comments welcomed.

I think most Spanish people will identify with the article. Working conditions in Spain are dire. salaries are low and the working hours are among the longest in Europe - the younger non.Trade Unionised generation are expected to work overtinme for free in most companies. of course, unemployment is high, and many are happy just to have a job. But the drive to reduce unemployment levels in recent years has meant that many jobs come with what we call here "contratos basura" - rubbish contracts. Spain is eager to be more productive - which often means providing jobs with less security. And it's leading to a highly-educated generation frustrated with what society has to offer.

Thanks for informing everyone about the article jabch. I found it very interesting and it reconfirmed what my husband has been saying for years about his generation in Spain. There are tons of people in Spain who are very qualified and are working in supermarkets.
Something that the article doesn't mention but is also true, because of the "baby boom" these generations couldn't always study what they wanted because there were too many students and not enough spots for all the students. Because of this there are a large number of late 20s and 30s who are not working in what they wanted to and are very unsatisfied with their jobs.
Thanks for the very interesting article on the new social class in Spain.

This seems to be true in a lot of countries. I do note however that people in Madrid seem to be able to a) eat out more often and b) go away for long weekends at every puente. I wonder if people do without things like home computers or new cars in favour of socialising and eating well?

As far as work goes there, it seems like they do at least have a ton of holidays.
Didn't they just have Nov. 1 and 2 off of work for the All Saints holiday?

All Saints' Day is Nov 1st and is only one day, not two. Nov 2nd was a normal workday.

In Spain we have a minimum of 30 days (or 22 working days) of personal holidays, stated by law. Some companies can give more than that if they want (mine do, I have 25 working days).

And about public holidays, in Spain there are 14 days every year, everywhere. Common to all the country, there are only 5-6 days (Oct 12th, Dec 25th, Jan 1st, Good Friday,...), the others depend on the region and/or the city. But the tally is 14 for every place in Spain.

Excellent article jabch. I knew that housing was a problemin Spain in particular for the young professionals. Not just because there is less housing to be had, which is a serious issue now being discussed in another thread, but because the cost of housing in desirable cities like Madrid and Barcelona has become impossible.

What I was unaware was the situation with the salaries among the Spanish professionals. And their inability to retrain because there are not enough slots:
Being in education I live with young people, particularly young professionals, who are well educated, but who have to return to the university to change their field because the field they entered is too full of candidates or not paying enough, so they re-train.

Lifelong learning seems to be the eternal condition for those of us in the Knowledge Age.
My question to those of you in Spain, can you explain why it is that a student cannot easily go back to school and retrain, or, improve their credentials?

A Spaniard friend of mine was expressing her frustration about salaries and independent living in Spain. Basically, she thinks it is almost impossible to get a job that will pay enough to get your own place or to be totally independent from parents or roommates. And here we are not talking about people in their early 20's but people in their late 20's and 30's. So she sent me this article titled something like "The Thousand-euro Generation". The article is very eye-opening as to the situation of young professionals in Spain.

La Generacion de los Mil Euros

All comments welcomed.

- Well, Spain is now the 3 rd country in all first world where people work more ours, only japanese and people from USA work more.

- The spaniard economy is very strong, grows three times more than the rest of countries of the UE but it's an economy based in:

a) Construction
b) Tourism

And it makes that the bussinessmen ask more for bricklayers, electricians, plumbers and welders than for biologists, lawyers, plilologists or nurses.
It could be impossible in other country but in Spain isn't easier fining a job if you have a college degree (unless it's in industrial enginering, architecture or medicine).
But even more incredible is that almost anybody that I know earn the same: I have friends who are lawyers, economists, waiters and gardeners and everybody earns between 950-1100 Euros (1250-1380 dollars/month).
Even informatic developers salaries have froze, and they are having a hard time finfing a good job.
But like I mentioned before, people who work in the construction have a better salaries, I have a friend pharmacist, he earns 1000 euros / month and he works 6 days per week.
I have other friend who is electrician, he work the same hours and earns 1800 euros month.

It's really sad that you can have 2 degrees and you earn less than somebody who is a waiter (with all my respect to the waiters).

By the way, now there's no problem with finfing jobs in Spain, we have now the lowest percentage of unemployement since the seventies, the problem is work in what you have study for.

Changing the subject, somebody have mentioned that in Spain a lot of people spend money eating in restaurants and traveling, that's true, but we not only spend money in that, we spend money in all, spanish economy is growing because the domestic expenditure is really HUGE, in the last 3 years Mercedez and BMW have sell 10% more cars, TFT televisions are selling 80% more, each year in Spain they sell 700.000 houses or flats, that's more than in Germany+France who have 150 milions of inhabitants and Spain only 43'5.

Spanish people is NOT SAVING MONEY and it could be VERY dangerous if the interests rates go up because everybody is paying a mortage.

If you ask me, people study too much in Spain! I've never met so many unemployed would-be lawyers. With prosperity came a natural desire for parents to give their children the education they never had. The result is that the universities are filled with young people studying what they see as prestigious degrees - in Spain this tends to be law. When they can't find a job they study some more, sit sate difficult exams, fail, study some more and so on. Young people are always doing some sort of course or other. Suddenly they're 30 and have a string of certificates but no work experience. The problem is what a previous poster has outlined. The structure of the Spanish economy is service-oriented. It doesn't need one million lawyers.

¡¡ THEY DO !!, In fact I do to.
The problem is that Spain had in the nineties the second higuest rate of people with college degrees of all world, and our economy simply can't absorb all the people who have studied.
Only industrial engineering and architecture can make improve your salary drastically and both degrees are VERY VERY HARD in Spain, it's not like business administration or laws, you can't work 50 hours each week and at the same time study architecture.
But there's a lot of people that retrain, they first studied biology or psicology and after that they studied business administration or economy or even to become informatician develover.
The rate of unemployement in business administration is low but the salaries are not great, maybe, 1000-1200 euros/month.
The problem is that Spain economy needs (like I said in my last post) electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and welders, a welder in Spain earns easily 2000-2500 euros month or even more, but...
Who want to become welder?
Then we are in the situation where thousands of people is well educated and they work like secretaries, in call centers, or like sales representative, or you see the crazy situation that 3 thousand nurses (and nursing is not an easy major in Spain) who have been hired by English and Danish hospitals because they don't have enough nurses, and this is starting to happen with doctors.
There's other problem, maybe a lot of people have low salaries but his families have money, and you can ask yourself: Then how have they money?
Because a lot of people is selling lands and plots in the middle of the open country to foreigners,
for exemple, in my father's town, they live more than 150 north europeans, the came here and bought orange trees fields and payed like 300.000 euros for that, then you have that each member of the family who sold the land earn 1.000 euros/month but they have in the bank 300.000 so his sons can study untill 30 years all, get two degrees and a master and even can buy 2 flats for the kids so when they turn 28 they don't need to make the economical effort.
It's incredible but this not happens only in this town, this is happening in the all the coast.

And there's other way of getting money, in Spain now we have 4 millions of inmigrants and they need to rent houses and renting in spain is expensive so you find a lot of people who earns 1000 euros but get 1000 more renting some old house to 15 romanians.
With this money they buy more houses, is a circle, housing in Spain is becoming a crazy thing.