Word: hardding
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...they grew up with two decades of strong economic growth and the optimistic assumption that they would be better off than their parents, just as their parents did better than the generation before them. The realization that Nikes, Wiis and cell phones are not their birthright comes as a hard lesson. With credit tight, young Spaniards are finding it virtually impossible to buy their own homes. Many have been forced to move back in with their parents or put off plans to move out. "A whole generation is having its ambitions thwarted," says Daniel Lostao, president of the Youth Council...
Like Ireland, which for more than a decade boasted growth rates three times the E.U. average, Spain's once booming economy has been hit especially hard by the downturn. Spain's GDP is expected to shrink 1.6% in 2009, and the first place that young people feel the contraction is in their purchasing power. "Kids today have grown up with consumerist expectations and feel frustrated when they can't maintain them," says Alberto Saco, sociologist at the University of Vigo. "But more frustrating is what is happening to their expectations about work and housing." (Read: "Ireland's Economy: Celtic Crunch...
...train ride away. Fernández doesn't see any end in sight to her dependency. "My father worked as a machinery operator, my mother is a housewife. They put me through school so that I'd have a better life than they did," she says. "It's really hard for them to understand why I can't find a job." She's given up her goal, at least temporarily, of becoming a sociologist and is instead considering joining one of Spain's last refuges of job security: the paramilitary Guardia Civil, which functions as a kind of national police...
Blue-Collar Blues The crisis has hurt 20-somethings without college degrees even more. In Vigo's unemployment office, people of all ages and backgrounds come by to get the stamp that allows them to receive unemployment payments, but it's hard not to miss the heavy predominance of blue-collar workers under 30. Manuel Bao, 24, has worked as an electrician since he was 18 - his contracts were never permanent but there was enough work to keep him busy. Now that the construction industry has gone bust, he's out of work - and about to run out of unemployment...
...only unemployment that disillusions Spain's young. Ivan, who does not want his last name used, actually has a job: he starts his days at 4 a.m. on Vigo's docks, hauling fish for his parents' wholesale business. But these days, he and his family have a hard time getting to the end of the month. Which is why, he says, he now trafficks drugs. That's not so unusual in a port known as a major point of entry for cocaine, but there is something about the nonchalance with which Ivan confesses it that underscores his despair. Asked...