Word: citro
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...long ago, Lorena Dominguez looked forward to the future. She had a well-paid job at the Citroën automobile factory in Vigo, the town in northern Spain where she had grown up. She had recently moved in with her boyfriend Oscar, and had put her own apartment on the market. The two spent their weekends hanging out with friends in Vigo's lively waterfront cafés and were planning to travel this summer. It wasn't a bad life for the 23-year-old daughter of a longshoreman and a housewife...
...sell her apartment, despite lowering the price several times. That failure cramped her plans for the future a bit - last year she and Oscar decided to spend their summer vacation closer to home - but it wasn't until December that she felt its full fury. Right before Christmas, Citroën let go 3,000 workers - 90% of them below the age of 35 - and Domínguez was one of them. Since then, she's had to rely on her parents to make her mortgage. "I always thought I would do better than my parents," she says...
...Citroën factory opened in Vigo in 1958; by 2007, it was manufacturing 547,000 cars a year and had become the company's highest-producing plant in Europe. It was also the largest company in the region of Galicia, directly employing more than 10,000 locals. Those steady, well-paid jobs helped transform what was once a rough-and-tumble port into a pleasant seaside city, complete with manicured boulevards, a contemporary-art museum and plenty of Zara outlets. By 1990, there were enough ambitious young people in Vigo to support a university...
...influx of kids - and of their parents' disposable incomes - helped foster new businesses. In 2005, Ramón González opened what would be the third tattoo parlor on the then bustling Pi y Maragall Avenue. Business boomed. Students, "Citroën workers and the kids of Citroën workers kept me busy," he says...
That, in turn, fuels the profound sense of frustration and hopelessness shared by millions of young Europeans as the recession tightens. In some ways, the good years have made things worse. Lorena Domínguez, the unemployed automobile worker in Vigo, never had a permanent contract at Citroën, but there were years when she was earning good money, and she expected that the firm would offer her a permanent contract one day. The future seemed full of promise and rising living standards. Now she spends her time looking for work waiting tables, selling insurance, cleaning offices. "My generation...