The Problem With The Balearic Young

Some years ago, a parent (English, married to a Mallorcan) told me that if she had a choice the family would move to Palma from Puerto Pollensa. Her concern was with her son's education. The city, Palma, was serious in a way that Puerto Pollensa was not. The education to be received there might have been good enough. But where was that education leading? The local kids, she explained, observed how things were in Puerto Pollensa: the summers of beach and having a good time. The summer had a hold. Education wasn't so important. Why worry too much with it when summers would mean bar and other seasonal jobs which would fund the fun of summer. Education was caught in a vice of summertime ethos.

These were remarks made pre-crisis. One positive aspect of crisis was that it addressed the lamentably high school dropout rate among Balearic sixteen-year-olds. Puerto Pollensa was not the only place to be affected by the abrupt disruption of that easy life of summertime. Staying on at school became more attractive. But despite this, the Balearics still lag well behind the rest of Spain in this regard - ten percentage points behind a national average of 95% of 16-year-olds who stay on at school. The actual school failure rate also shows a ten per cent difference: 32% as opposed to a national 22.

The problems with an underperforming state education system in the Balearics are well known and have been much discussed. While fingers might be pointed in the direction of politicians and teachers (their organisations more than individuals) and more crucially the system itself, none can be held wholly to account. There appears to be a more deep-seated malaise - a social one that is linked inextricably to the nature of the job market.

The Gadeso research foundation has reported this week that 21.4% of those aged between 20 and 24 fall into the category of the "ni-ni", someone who neither works nor studies. In comparative terms, the Balearics are not as bad in this regard as with school performance: the national rate is 20.6%. They presumably find their way into the unemployment statistics. The Labour Force Survey for the final quarter of 2015 placed this at just under 45% for this age group. The rate is very much worse for the 16 to 19 group below it: getting on for 75%.

Seasonality obviously influences fourth quarter figures, but it is this - seasonality - which explains so much. It isn't only the young who are affected in a harmful fashion, but they are harmed more than most.

Crisis put the opportunities of the young into sharp relief and most certainly not only in the Balearics and Spain. But it gave rise to some extraordinary disruption. Away from the Balearics there was the case of the town of Benalup in Andalusia, a community all but destroyed when the construction industry collapsed and took with it great numbers of young people who had left school to work in the industry, had been earning very good money, bought properties with cheap mortgages, only for it all to suddenly and devastatingly go Benalup.

To address the problem of unemployment among the young there, training courses were introduced. As with Mallorca, these training courses have provided a glut of people with qualifications as, for example, web and graphic designers. An economy cannot, however, survive on design. How many designers does any one economy actually need?

Of ministers in the current Balearic government, there is one who seems to be doing his work diligently. He is the employment (and trade) minister, Iago Negueruela. His is arguably the most difficult of the portfolios of government. He is variously charged with tackling job-market seasonality, working conditions and contracts, diversification of the economy and of course unemployment full stop. But his is not work that is in isolation. It is tied in with Biel Barceló's tourism (and innovation and development) ministry and Marti March's education ministry. At more distance, but also important, is Vicenç Vidal's agriculture portfolio. Why this? There is a serious deficiency in the number of young people in the agriculture sector.

Farming, though, is no more a game-changing panacea for youth unemployment woes than is Barceló's desire for innovation. Nor is the youth guarantee work scheme for which Negueruela is responsible. The take-up is nothing like he would hope that it would be. Nor, might it be said, will be government coercion - aimed principally at the hoteliers - to introduce higher-paid and full contracts. Even a left-wing regime can interfere or intervene only so much in the workings of the market.

One wonders, though, how much of an improvement the government can make. Is it the case that there is an attitudinal problem, as the parent from Puerto Pollensa suggested? Is this the nature of the beast? If so, it is a beast that Mallorca has bred.

MALLORCA TODAY - Youth unemployment in Spain worsens

A report by Bancaja and the Valencia Institute of Economic Research has revealed that a half of young people in Spain do not get a job by the time they are 23 years of age. In 2005 the same half would have found employment by the age of 19.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - High youth unemployment in the Balearics

According to a study under the auspices of the regional government's employment ministry, only one in four people below the age of 30 in the Balearics has a regular job.

See more: Ultima Hora

No Future: Spain's youth unemployment

"No future." The Sex Pistols' anthemic banshee wail hollered out of the group's vitriolic celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in 1977. No future was against a background of British economic basket-case-ism, its punk nihilism the breeding ground for the invective hurled by The Jam, The Beat and The Specials at the hopelessness of the wasteland years of Thatcherism that were to come.

Yet alongside the no future of the early '80s, a confidence also began to emerge. To continue the musical context, it was the Thatcher rock of smug yuppie-ism, of "loadsamoney" and of aspiration of a good life, made video real through fast boats and dreamy island landscapes by Duran Duran.

No future was no future only up to a point. Thatcher's heartlessness destroyed heartland manufacturing and mining communities for which the future took years to become even a possibility, but the fast-buck avarice that burst out from the monetarist chest of a government in thrall to the diktats of the Chicago School put braces on the former barrow boys turned Gekkos who swaggered into a liberalising City.

What goes around, comes around. And it finally came around in 2008. But whereas there was a future, albeit a different future in the 1980s, where is it now? While Britain contends, against the backdrop of another Jubilee, with its own future and that in particular of its youth, Spain has to contend with one of its own.

No future. If the youth are the future, and the youth always are the future, then they need an anthem around which to rally, one which, you might hope, was less Kierkegaard than that of the Pistols. It is hard to see where one would come from, as peering through the murk of Spain's economy, it is impossible to see light at the end of the tunnel, as not even the tunnel is visible. The cloud has enveloped the economy and descended into the minds of those whose vision of a future is obscured by its demoralising density.

Fifty per cent youth unemployment. It is an appalling statistic. Nowhere else in Europe does youth unemployment as badly as Spain. And even for the lucky ones who get a job, they have now acquired a title - the "nimileuristas". Paid so badly, they fail to break the thousand a month mark. And for many of those from the youth job market who do get a job, they find themselves also with temporary contracts, meaning they are easy to dispense with.

The national government's labour reforms are meant to try and address temporary work, but the general feeling is that they won't. But whether they do or they don't, the real issue is that of creating employment, which means creating growth, and neither have any obvious sign of being achieved by a national government that made an electoral virtue of pledging to tackle unemployment.

The labour reforms are bringing the demonstrators onto the streets. The threat of a general strike comes firstly as a consequence of these reforms and secondly from an unwillingness on behalf of the government to talk to the unions. Prime Minister Rajoy has made a plea for patriotism in tackling Spain's problems, but it is one that characterises the roles that are being played in the game now being acted out, with Rubalcaba and PSOE being accused of fomenting dissent and the big bad wolves of the unions only too happy to go along with a grim fairy tale and threaten to bring everything to a halt by eating whole little Rajoy riding the fable of nationhood.

But there, amidst this pantomime, are the 50% youth unemployed and the "nimileuristas", exactly the ones who should ride the wave of growth into the future but who find that the surf, far from being up, is instead becalmed to the point of it forming a massive sea of stagnant water, silted up and incapable of movement.

No future. Rajoy has no vision of the future, other than praying to God that the cavalry of the private sector charges over the hills with lorries full of building materials. Get the youth back on the sites, let them abandon education, coin it in for a few years, saddle themselves with loans and wait for it all to go belly-up again. But even this scenario of boom to bust being repeated is questionable.

So, what is there? Not much. Street protests and a general strike (one that many seem disinclined to take part in because of a loss of a day's wages) would have been anticipated. For the youth, however, there is less to lose. There is nothing to lose. Spain is storing up a whole mess of problems and a whole mess of conflict.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.