Word: jobbing
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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...
Portela and her friends are certainly aware they have more to worry about than shopping sprees. Paula Rodríguez, 20, is studying journalism. "But there aren't any jobs in that, so I'll probably just stay in school longer and get another degree," she says. The prospect of owning a home - and the mortgage that comes with it - makes all four girls laugh, so far-fetched does it seem. "How am I going to get a mortgage if I can't even get a job?" scoffs Rodríguez...
...lack of decently paid jobs for young Europeans is one of the continent's great failings, a phenomenon so broad that in country after country people have coined shorthand terms to describe a generation frustrated by its plight. In France that term is jeunes diplômés. In Greece, Generation 600. And in Spain its members are called mileuristas. "The mileurista," explains Daniel Lostao, president of the Youth Council of Spain, "is someone who earns €1,000 ($1,300) a month, despite all their education and training. They've got master's degrees and speak multiple languages...
...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 force...
...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 benefits as well. "Right now, I'm dependent on my mother," he says ruefully. In the hopes of finding a stable job, Bao is preparing to take the exam that would allow him to become a security guard. " If that doesn't work," he says, "I guess I'll just go from job to job and try to survive...