It is not the job Marta Alba trained to do, or the one she dreamt of as a child. She doesn’t even know the salary on offer. But she knows it is a job, and a job is precious if you are 26 years old, unemployed and live in Spain.
Marta spent five years studying to be a nurse but hospital jobs are few and far between right now. She lost her part-time post at a dental clinic last year and her unemployment benefits will only last so long. She wants a job – any job – that will help her get a little closer to the life she wants to lead, to have a flat of her own and start a family with Pablo, her long-time boyfriend. Her dreams are not wildly ambitious; she just wants a “traditional life” and, if possible, to live in Seville, where she was born and still lives with her parents.
This time, the odds are far from bad. Marta knows that only five candidates were interviewed, and the two jobs as sales representatives for a pharmaceutical company are still on offer. But she worries that most of her rivals are better placed, with previous experience in sales.
“I don’t even know what the conditions are but whatever they are I would take the job. It would sort out my life,” she says. Her interview went well, Marta feels, but maybe not well enough. As she turned to say goodbye to the interviewer, he told her: “Whatever happens, don’t lose your smile.” It seemed like a message of consolation, a few words to weigh again and again over the coming days, until the final answer arrives.
So far, unemployment has indeed done little to repress Marta’s smile. “I am very lucky,” she tells me repeatedly, as she sips a Diet Coke after her interview. She feels lucky because both her parents are still in work and can help her out; lucky because her boyfriend has a job and earns some money working with computers; lucky because she can use her family’s holiday flat on the nearby coast, which is almost like going on holiday.
But she feels lucky above all else because there are so many young people in Spain who are even worse off. Among her class at nursing college, she knows only two out of 100 who have managed to find work in the profession. In her close circle of friends, seven out of 10 are without a job.
Almost all still live with their parents. Those who do find work, says Marta, usually labour in precarious conditions, on temporary contracts, almost always for little money.
Safe, permanent positions with benefits and decent pay – the kind of job that would allow you to buy a house and start a family – seem as rare as snow in a Seville summer. “I don’t know anyone who has a permanent contract,” says Marta. “It’s not even something I think about.”
As we walk through her neighbourhood in Sevilla Oeste, she spots a friend and neighbour in her twenties, out walking her dog in the middle of a weekday morning. “Unemployed,” says Marta. They stop and talk briefly. Seconds later, another young woman cycles by. “She as well,” says Marta.
In Spain, no matter who you are or what you talk about, there is always a before and an after. Before means the good years, when jobs and money were plentiful, when the economy was on a tear and the housing boom was turning bricklayers into sports car owners. It was the decade leading up to 2008, a period that Spaniards refer to, almost biblically, as las vacas gordas, the years of the “fat cows”.
After is what came next: the housing bust, the banking crisis, debt, default and bankruptcies, the cruelty of the house evictions and the shame of the European bailout, the long and bitter recession and, of course, the loss of millions of jobs. Like a tidal wave raking a seaside village, Spain’s economic crisis left nothing and no one undamaged. But some sectors of society were clearly less prepared for the impact: migrants, the poorly educated and – perhaps above all others – Spain’s young.
When the crisis hit, companies up and down the country responded by firing the people they could fire easily – those who were still on temporary contracts. It was a cynical but natural response to Spain’s notorious two-tier labour market, in which workers on permanent contracts enjoy better pay, more benefits and are more difficult to fire. Most of those on temporary contracts, unsurprisingly, were young people fresh out of school or university.