To José María Fidalgo, general secretary of CC.OO. between 2000 and 2008, nothing occurred to him during his mandate other than to say that in “Spain there was an abundance of low-skilled employment and that jobs with greater added value were needed.” They set up the world championship for him, although he was right. The problem was not so much labor, but rather a growth model based on tourism and construction.
Twenty years later, as economist José Carlos Díez says, “the main problem of the Spanish economy is not job creation, but the type of employment and the lack of productivity.” And as a button shows. The Spanish Government has just sent its budget projections for next year to Brussels, in which it assures that 700,000 jobs will be created between 2023 and 2024.
But what kind of jobs? In Spain there is a lack of workers in hospitality, construction and in all occupations that Spaniards no longer want because they are very poorly paid. We have entered a dynamic in which we need more and more migrants, while the purchasing power of workers is increasingly less.
Thus the paradox arises that a large number of workers arrive and at the same time a good number of qualified professionals have to emigrate. It’s as if it is frowned upon to remunerate talent. According to what a friend’s son told me, he has replaced his boss who has retired, but they have not given him the status or salary that he had.
It is as if new technologies, including artificial intelligence, are being used by companies to lower costs, but not to give new opportunities to workers.
Today, shared prosperity does not work, as happened with the industrial revolution after the Second World War. The American new deal, which was followed by Germany and Japan, represented humanity’s greatest period of prosperity.
Increasing productivity to only increase profits can lead us to the cliff. As young people increasingly have trouble paying their mortgages, rent, or making ends meet, they are rebelling against a system that does not allow them to prosper.
This would be one of the reasons, among many others, why they feel more attracted to populism, both left and right. For the former, capitalism must be ended to preserve democracy, as Sumar advocates; For the latter, on the contrary, democracy must be limited to preserve capitalism. As Martin Wolf, economic editor of the Financial Times, states in his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.
They are both wrong. Capitalism and democracy are needed to prosper. It is true that in Spain populism is not yet a majority movement, but we must not forget that Sumar and Vox are key pieces in forming a government.
Therefore, it is a bad idea to create a lot of low added value employment and at the same time the purchasing power of salaries collapses. It is no coincidence that Spain is one of the countries in Europe in which workers, especially young people, have lost the most purchasing power since the Great Crisis of 2008 began.
Nor is it a coincidence that per capita income is 30% below the European average or 40% below the German average. This is not a problem of parties or political leaders, it is a trend that Aznar, Zapatero, Rajoy and Sánchez have maintained. All of them have prioritized employment over productivity. Big donkey, whether it walks or not.