Word: spaining
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Spending Cuts Then came Spain's property crash and the financial turmoil in the U.S., which tipped the world into recession. On a recent Friday, González's studio was empty. There is at least one boarded-up storefront on every block of the street where it is located. Cafés, children's boutiques, legal offices, furniture stores, language schools - the recession has closed them all. "I'm getting by on piercings," says González with a shrug. "They're a lot cheaper, so the kids can still get enough money to pay for them...
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...
...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, but they can only...
Thwarted ambition is not the only problem. One of the dirty little secrets of Spain's boom years was the number of people Spanish firms employed on casual contracts. In an effort to make its labor market more flexible, the country has the highest rate of temporary jobs in the European Union: one in three. The great majority of those "trash contracts," as they're called by locals, go to the young, making them the easiest (read: least expensive) workers to fire. None of this is new. Young people have complained of being mileuristas since Europe adopted the common currency...
...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...