A few days ago I started a meeting with EBAU students telling them: “Don’t worry about your future because you don’t have it”. A tense silence was created and what was intended to be a joke became the center of a lively debate. Little by little, the concern of young people emerged, what has come to be called “futurophobia”: fear of what is coming their way.
It is logical that they are afraid, since the world that we are leaving to our children and grandchildren is not exactly ideal. You only have to watch the news to realize that we are threatened by a nuclear war; a climate change; an economic recession and a heavy indebtedness inherited from their parents that they will have to pay all their lives; and, of course, none of them believe that when they retire they will receive a pension, although they know that it is their turn to pay that of their parents and grandparents.
The uncertainty is even greater when you are told that 90% of the jobs that will be created in the next decade have not yet been invented. We are in a deep-rooted technological revolution in which artificial intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg.
The data does not lie. Spain is one of the European countries with the highest level of youth unemployment. In addition, those who have found employment work in jobs for which they are overqualified. Spanish universities are not among the best, quite the contrary. The same happens with professional training, which is not socially recognized as it should be. And all this without forgetting school failure, with which we have the dubious honor of being at the top of the ranking.
In other words, young people have been the great pending issue for decades for governments of different tendencies and ideologies. It is true that politicians fill their mouths to talk about Next Generation funds and the large investments that are going to be made with the money that comes from Europe.
But the reality is that the wages of young people are extremely low for those who have been lucky enough to find a job or a place to do an internship.
The three crises that have been chained together in the last twenty years, the financial one of 2008, the Covid one of 2020 and the war in Ukraine of 2022 have reduced purchasing power in a tailspin. A situation that has been aggravated by the inflationary shock. The government of Pedro Sánchez knows this and has tried to alleviate it with different “bonuses” and royalties, which do not solve his problems.
The danger is exactly the opposite, that they get used to surviving with the bare minimum thanks to the support of their parents and grandparents. They live in a minimal society in which the manifesto of Paul Lafargue, Carlos Marx’s son-in-law, “the right to laziness” (1880) begins to make a fortune. Why are they going to take care of their future when they know they don’t have it.
The income of active workers has risen an average of 3%, while the last rise of 8.5% in pensions, which has had a cost of 16,000 million euros, an amount equivalent to all State spending on education. At a time when the country has become poorer with the war in Ukraine. The sacrifice should have been distributed equally among all, but for electoral reasons it was decided to protect pensioners because they represent more than 10 million votes.
Those of us who were born in the 20th century became a very important lobbying force because of the baby boom of the 1960s. We were the majority group and, therefore, what we had the strength to put pressure on the politicians. Those young people of “May 68” are the pensioners of the 21st century and we continue to be the majority group. In an aging society like Spain’s, budgetary decisions are systematically directed towards favoring the elderly while the rulers systematically forget about the young.
This is probably the main pending structural reform in Spain.
