Living to Work

Rafael Bastido de los Santos has a master’s degree and speaks excellent English. But he lives with his parents and is stuck in a low-skilled job. Like many young Spaniards, he faces a choice between life at home and more attractive career opportunities abroad.

On his first day of work at the recycling plant, he saw a colleague from his hotel job – another well-educated young go-getter like him. Rafa was surprised to see him, but the colleague told him he’d been at the recycling plant for four years. Rafa stared, shocked that someone like his colleague would be working several part-time jobs, too. “What the fuck are we doing here?” he said.

Two years ago, life looked very different. Rafa was living in Graz, Austria, where he shared an apartment with his Austrian girlfriend – whom he had met in Seville – while finishing up his online master’s in business via the University of Camilo José Cela in Madrid. To earn a living, he worked “under-the-table” as a waiter in Mexican restaurants and Irish pubs, while also playing semi-professional football in an Austrian league. In his spare time, he studied German and perfected his English. 

Before moving to Graz, Rafa had worked in the marketing department of companies based in Seville and in Germany, giving him plenty of professional experience, along with the added bonus of having worked in a multi-national environment. He figured that with his CV, he’d be a shoe-in for a job back in Spain, where, eventually, he wanted to return.

But suddenly, his plans collapsed. He and his girlfriend broke up, his masters program finished, and he had nowhere to go. Almost overnight, he found himself feeling totally alone in a foreign country. Without fluent German, Rafa knew his chances of finding a job in Austria would be low. He didn’t have a job lined up in Spain, either. So, broke and homeless, Rafa moved back to his parents’ flat in Alcalá de Guadaira. He was twenty-six. 

• • •

I’D FIRST HEARD ABOUT RAFA through another young Andalusian, also named Rafa (in this case, Rafael Álvarez), who was the president of the Andalusian Youth Council, a group dedicated to advocating for young people on a regional government level. When I met with Rafael Álvarez on a trip to Seville in December 2019, he mentioned to me he’d recently met a guy who seemed down on his luck – several part-time gigs, no permanent employment – but full of big business ideas. He referred to the man, Rafa Bastida, as “emprendedor”, very enterprising. 

Rafa Bastida sounded like a lot of young Spaniards I had met during the two years I lived in the country. My friends were well-educated and had experience working and studying abroad, yet always seemed to have trouble finding long-term, stable work. One friend, Andrea, studied nutrition and wellness while working part-time at a Madrid homeopathy shop and running her own fledgling business as a lifestyle coach, yet still barely made enough to get by. Another friend who studied journalism in Barcelona worked more part-time gigs than I could count and was constantly worried she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent for her room on the outskirts of the city. 

I knew that young people in Andalusia, the largest of Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions, faced the same problems as youth in Madrid and Barcelona – but even more drastically, as poverty and unemployment rates are much higher in the south of Spain than in the country’s more affluent industrial centres. So when I heard Rafa’s story back in December, I called him on the phone to arrange to meet him in his home town, the following month.

Rafa and I first meet on a bright January day in Alcalá de Guadaira, a city of some 75,000 people, about a thirty-minute drive from Seville. The city, once booming with factories and large-scale panaderías, or bakeries, is now less its own city and more a suburb of Seville. Its unemployment rate is one of the highest in Spain, at 26.4 per cent, according to a report published in May by the National Institute of Statistics, a Spanish data collection agency. In Andalusia, youth unemployment – defined as the unemployment rate for young people under the age of twenty-five who are in search of work – is 45.7 percent, according to EPdata, a part of the Spanish news wire service Agencia Europa Press. Spain doesn’t collect the same data on young people over twenty-five – that is, people who are Rafa’s age – but anecdotal information indicates that they suffer similar struggles as those under twenty-five.

Andalusia is what comes to mind when foreigners think of Spain. The region is home to flamenco music and dance; to the colourful Semana Santa (Easter Week) procession and the Feria de Abríl (The April Fair) – a lively, week-long fiesta accompanied by copious amounts of cheap beer or sangria with free tapas. Spain’s oldest bullring is located in Ronda, an Andalusian town Ernest Hemingway made famous in his Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The weather here is mild during the winter, and the beaches are some of the most sought-after in Europe. During the summer months, the midday heat becomes too unbearable for work, giving rise to the siesta – the several-hour work break after lunch – and the stereotype both within Spain and the rest of Europe that Andalusians are lazy. 

Yet for all its international allure and rich cultural history, few outsiders know Andalusia as a place riddled with poverty. The region faces complex labour and immigration challenges. When General Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and established his dictatorship over the country, he invested in the industrialisation of northern regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country – once strongholds of the Second Spanish Republic – to stifle nationalist movements there. Today, Andalusia lacks the strong industry seen in Madrid, the Basque Country, and Catalonia; though, with 8.4 million inhabitants, its population is larger than each of these more industrialised regions.

Andalusia remains largely agricultural, its economy dependent upon a sector that increasingly relies on “under-the-table” immigrant work and seasonal contracts. In the 1990s, immigrants from Morocco and Sub-Saharan Africa began moving to Andalusia in large numbers, often through illicit routes, with the aid of people smugglers. In 2001, Spain and Morocco signed an agreement to provide temporary work visas for agricultural labourers, and during the subsequent years, thousands of both legal and illegal migrants have constructed shanty towns of wood and plastic, mostly in western Andalusia. The plastic covering – sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter – comes from the greenhouses where the labourers work year round. Many workers pick fruit and vegetables that feed Europeans across the continent, yet they toil long hours, earn sub-par wages, and suffer verbal and physical abuses, according to a 2019 investigation by the non-governmental organisation European Coordination Via Campesina.  In Huelva, another Andalusian region to the east, many female Moroccan strawberry pickers experience sexual abuse in addition to receiving low wages. 

In Jerez de la Frontera, a city an hour’s train ride from Seville, Juan Blanco, a thirty-four-year-old journalism graduate who now lives in Brussels, saw the decline of agricultural work play out during his adolescence. His family is working class – his father worked in construction, and his mother stayed at home – but that was enough to live comfortably in Jerez at the time. The city is known for its red wine, specifically the sweet dessert wine sherry, or, in Spanish, jerez, for which the place is named. When he was growing up, Juan would work the grape harvest each September to save up for university.

Working in the fields is how most people used to earn a living in Jerez and the rest of Andalusia, but after Spain joined the European Economic Community in 1986 – and, subsequently, the European Union – the country’s agricultural sector fundamentally changed. Farmers began selling their produce cheaply and in bulk, and multinational firms set up shop in the city. Small, family-owned businesses were decimated. Juan remembers when mechanised harvesting was introduced to vineyards, eliminating seasonal labouring jobs. He also remembers how farmers would rip up hundred-year-old grapevines and plant sunflowers to make sunflower oil. “The agricultural sector was declining,” Juan says. “Jobs were disappearing. And in its wake came the tourism industry.” Now the city has one of the highest unemployment rates in Spain – even higher than Seville. Labourers outside of the agricultural sector tend to have more stable jobs, but their work is precarious all the same. Besides agriculture, Andalusia’s other main economic driver is tourism, which in 2019 set a new record with 32.5 million visitors (though numbers have since plummeted, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic). Rafa, like many of his friends, has worked in tourism for years, cleaning dishes, serving drinks, working month-to-month on temporary contracts. 

Before meeting with me around noon, Rafa spent the morning reading the newspapers, searching the Internet for jobs, and taking an online professional development course. That’s how most mornings go, unless one of his employers asks him to take an early shift. He rarely knows his work schedule more than a week in advance. “It’s frustrating,” he says of his schedule. “The wage is not a stable wage.” 

I’ve caught Rafa on his day off, when normally he might be out playing football or doing other activities related to his interminable job search. But he’s happy to play tour guide; in fact, he seems to relish it. He works in the hospitality business, after all. As he drives me around in a stick shift he bought from his sister a few years ago, he rattles off architectural facts about the region – his grandfather, he tells me, was one of the architects who designed Seville’s Plaza España, a majestic square replete with a shimmering blue moat and Moorish Revival-style towers. He also mentions he’ll send me a list of Seville’s best bars for when I return to the city later that evening. 

The twenty-seven-year-old is garrulous and eager to please. Once photographer Rob Pinney meets us at the hotel where Rafa works later in the afternoon, Rafa moves effortlessly between English and Spanish, peppering both of us with questions about our work, our career trajectories, our incomes. 

But before we get to the hotel, Rafa drives to a leafy park, where he wants to show me the old Roman ruins and mills where the city’s bakers used to have their grain ground into flour. As we walk along the river, I ask him how he’s felt being back home and living with his parents after spending years abroad. He looks around at joggers and the couples pushing baby carriages down the path, and sighs. “The return has made me feel a bit small,” he says. “I’ve lived so much, and I’m here again.” 

• • •

RAFA’S STORY IS NOT UNCOMMON IN SPAIN. Thirty-two per cent of Spaniards aged under twenty-five who are part of the labour market, are unemployed, compared to an average of 15.4 per cent across the EU. At the same time, nearly 82 per cent of Spaniards between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine lived in their parents’ home in the first half of 2019, according to Spain’s Youth Emancipation Observatory – the highest percentage since 2002. 

Meanwhile, three-quarters of employed Spanish youth work on temporary contracts lasting anywhere from a few months to a year. Such precarious situations can last years, diminishing young people’s ability to negotiate higher salaries and make career advancements. As El País, the country’s widest circulation daily newspaper, put it bluntly last year, “From 2008 until now people younger than 25 years old have been clearly those most damned by the regression experienced in the labor market.”  This age group, some argue, could be extended to those under thirty, given their low rate of emancipation from their parents’ houses. 

While the country has fared better than Greece and – by some metrics – Italy in the years after the 2008 economic crisis, Spain’s labour market has struggled to accommodate young workers. Millennials are Spain’s most educated generation. Many have studied abroad with the Erasmus program, learned foreign languages, and gained work experience through internships. Yet many of these same highly-educated, multilingual graduates cannot find meaningful and secure professional work. Like Rafa, these young Spaniards live month-to-month on temporary contracts, uncertain as to whether they’ll make enough money to pay the rent. Others leave the country altogether in search of better career prospects in more dynamic labour markets, such as Germany, Belgium, and the UK.

Because of the high youth unemployment rate, young people in Spain get a bad rap from their elders and foreign observers alike. In the wake of the financial crisis, Spanish media had a penchant for calling young, precarious Spaniards living with their parents “ninis”, short for “ni estudios ni trabajo”, neither in studies nor work. This condescending language does little to address the root causes of the issue. Rather, like a band-aid, it merely serves as a cheap response to the symptoms. It’s not that Spanish youth don’t want to work. It’s that the labour market they’re entering into makes it so difficult for them to work. 

So how did Spain get here? To understand the current youth employment crisis, one must go back several decades. Prior to the 1970s – which saw the death of Franco in 1975, the restoration of the monarchy, and a gradual transition to democracy – young people entered the labour market early and their first jobs typically set them on a career trajectory they’d follow for the rest of their lives. They often left secondary school before obtaining a diploma, but school didn’t matter. They had stable careers ahead of them.

Then, following the 1973 oil shock crisis and the resulting global economic recession, everything began to change. Contracts were slashed, jobs disappeared, and employers favoured workers with seniority. Young people fell behind. In the 1980s, a labour reform aimed at making the Spanish economy more flexible resulted in the proliferation of temporary work contracts, laying the foundation for employers’ deep reliance on them today. 

But by the turn of the millennium, the employment situation for young workers appeared to change for the better as the Spanish economy experienced a sustained economic boom – at least on the surface. During that time, an unusually high GDP growth rate contributed to a “housing bubble”; while tax revenues from the flourishing property investment and construction sectors skyrocketed, allowing government expenditure on infrastructure and public services to surge. The construction sector employed millions of people to build new commercial buildings and houses across the country. These circumstances facilitated an environment of cheap, easy credit meaning that young people could buy homes and move from their parents’ with relatively little difficulty. 

Then, in 2008, the housing bubble burst. The economy was decimated and half a million families, unable to pay their mortgages, were evicted from their homes. At the height of the crisis in 2013, Spain’s unemployment rate was 27 per cent. Fifty-five per cent of young people were unemployed, with more than half of adults under age thirty living with their parents.

In 2012, in an attempt to make the labour market again more flexible, the conservative Partido Popular government made it easier and cheaper for employers to fire workers. Temporary workers thus became even more expendable. Now, employers invest fewer resources into training temporary employees, and, according to University of Barcelona professor Judit Vall, such contracts trap young people in a “spiral” that erodes their ability to negotiate higher salaries and gain career momentum. 

While Spain’s economic situation has improved in the last few years, the temporary contracts remain an entrenched problem. 

“I’ve known people that, in one year, receive sixty, even ninety contracts,” says Eduardo Magaldi, spokesperson for RUGE, a union supporting young Spanish workers. Temporary contracts are endemic to the tourism sector, one of Spain’s most important sources of income. That work is seasonal, meaning many workers are employed only during the summer months. 

Imagine this, says Magaldi: “You’re working your ass off for six months, and with this money that you’ve earned, you live the rest of the year.” No savings, no up-ward career trajectory. Just working to live. 

• • •

RAFA IS LIVING TO WORK. At coffee breaks and at lunch during our day in Alcalá de Guadaira, he checks his phone to respond to emails and take calls from potential employers. He rattles off his responsibilities and pet projects. This spring, he says, he’ll focus on professional development. Brush up on his German, maybe study Italian. He also wants to start an events planning business with a friend, to combine two of his main interests: work and fun. 

“Step by step. That is my rule,” he says. “I don’t know what will happen this year. Maybe I will be in London or Brussels. I am a little bit scared.” 

But these are long-term goals. Given the instability of the job market, Rafa says, he can’t predict what will happen in even the near future. 

Two days after our first visit to Alcalá, Rob and I return to spend another afternoon with Rafa. The day proceeds much the same as the first: a trip to a lookout point above the city, another tour of Roman mills, more coffee. When we sit down at a bar on the outskirts of town, Rafa pulls out his phone. Reading from his email, he counts the number of jobs he applied for the day before alone. “One, two, three, four… Eight. I applied for eight.” 

Each day, he aims to send queries out for six or seven different positions: store manager, marketing specialist, financial manager. “A little bit of everything,” he says. He’s always turned on, seeking out a new business opportunity. (A few weeks after our meeting, he asked if he could partner with Point.51 on a marketing and tourism project. Grinning, I politely told him we could not pursue such a project.)

As we drink our coffee, Rafa receives a call from a potential employer in Burgos, a city in north-central Spain. They chat for a few minutes and Rafa promises to send a follow up email. When they hang up, Rafa shrugs. “Seems fine.” 

Several times during my trip, I mention that I can’t understand how Rafa manages to keep all this information – job opportunities and professional development and scheming for future ventures – in his head. “I don’t plan each month,” he says. “I plan the day. Tomorrow, what do I have to do? It’s a capacity for improvisation.” 

• • •

RAFA’S FATHER never needed to develop such a capacity. He spent forty years with the same employer – the United States naval base in Rota, a town close to Alcalá. As an aircraft mechanic – a civilian contractor employed by the U.S. Navy – he was able to support a stay-at-home wife and three children. He never experienced the uncertainty that his son does. He doesn’t understand the temporary contracts, nor why his son is constantly applying for jobs. Nor does he understand the need to move abroad to find work. 

In Spain, where family remains the centre of society and functions as the most essential social safety net, older Spaniards are often sceptical of their children’s decisions to work abroad. Rafa’s parents don’t travel much. His mother was scared that her son might run into trouble in a foreign country, and she’d be too far away to help. Rafa tries to explain his situation, but he’s convinced they won’t understand. 

Thirty or forty years ago, Rafa tells me, working class Spaniards often found employment like this:  “You’d go at six in the morning to the bakery, or the mechanic, and ask for a job, then start that day. This person would spend thirty years working and then they retired. They didn’t even need to study.” 

It doesn’t work that way anymore. 

Of Rafa’s close friends, he’s the only one who has returned home. But the others haven’t had it easy. Several have moved abroad to find better paying opportunities elsewhere – including Dublin, Ireland, where the cost of living is significantly higher than in Seville. 

During the 2008 economic crisis, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards moved abroad to other EU countries like the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany. Many of the emigrants were doctors, scientists, and engineers, creating a so-called “brain drain” that has had lasting effects on the Spanish healthcare system and economy. 

The brain drain continues today. In some cities, notably Barcelona, gentrification, short-term holiday rentals, and foreign property investment have drastically increased rent prices, while wages have remained relatively stagnant. As a result, many people entering the labour force can’t afford to live where the jobs are – Spain’s most expensive cities – so they move to other European countries where pay is higher and work is more stable. 

Like others in his generation, Juan Blanco, the journalism graduate from Jerez de la Frontera, moved abroad for work – though it took him several years to realise that was the only way he could earn a living. After finishing high school, he first went to nearby Seville for his bachelor’s degree. After completing his studies, he worked several low-paid journalism internships, but after the 2008 financial crisis, media jobs dried up. He found work at a consumer protection NGO, but the money was still not enough. He saw “no possibility of exit” in terms of finding a better job, so in 2013, Juan decided to go back to school for a master’s in European studies in an attempt to boost his CV. 

After graduating from the program, Juan found a full-time job at the University of Seville, in which he earned 927 Euros a month – after tax. Based upon the Spanish income tax rate for that year, this put his salary at around two-thirds of Spain’s average monthly income; though it is difficult to judge the exact figure, as reported incomes often include health benefits. In Seville, a city whose housing prices had ballooned at a rate unequal to wage increases, Juan and his partner shared an apartment for 550 Euros a month. He watched his money vanish. “I couldn’t save anything,” he says. 

The situation was even more stressful because Juan felt he could easily be replaced.

 “You have the sensation that if you tell your bosses you’re not satisfied with the job, they will tell you, ‘Why don’t you go? There are a hundred people waiting in line behind you,’” Juan says. “In the end, it’s a competition at the bottom. You lower your expectations.” 

After a year struggling to make ends meet, Juan decided he had to leave the country in order to find stable, decently-paid work. Having passed the age of thirty, by which time many Europeans begin to settle down and start a family, he once again became a becaria – an intern – just as he had been in his early twenties, as a recent university graduate. 

Subsequent internships took Juan to Vienna and to Luxembourg. Finally, in January of 2020, Juan landed a full-time job with Izquierda Unida, a leftist Spanish political party, in the Belgian – and EU – capital of Brussels.

“I am conscious that my situation is one of privilege,” he says. “To be able to find a job abroad, you usually have to do a master’s.”

Sometimes, people in Brussels ask him how he could ever leave Spain. You have amazing weather and food, they tell him. Why did you come here, a place where the sky is always grey? 

He tells them, “All of it, the beautiful beaches, the sun, is for you. You can come to Spain for vacation. For me, I’ll return to enjoy Spain when I am retired.”

• • •

WALK AROUND ANY northern European country and you’ll likely hear a Spanish accent. While some of the Spaniards are tourists, many, like Juan, have moved north, where jobs are more plentiful and salaries considerably higher. 

Mateu Rayo, a twenty-five-year-old electrical engineer, has lived in Frankfurt for several years. After attending university in Girona, a city in Catalonia, Mateu moved to Germany, where he figured he’d have a chance to gain foreign work experience and learn a new language. He spent a year studying German and, after passing his language exam, landed a job with a company that assembles electrical equipment. Now, he spends his work weeks travelling the country to meet with clients. 

Mateu considers himself relatively lucky. Friends in Barcelona live in expensive apartments and make 1,000 Euros a month, barely enough to live on. “They don’t save anything,” he says. 

But Mateu misses life in Spain. He’s from Sa Pobla, a small town on the island of Majorca, known for its lively San Antoni fire festival. There, everyone knows everyone, and everyone is always up for getting a drink and spending an evening together. In Frankfurt, on the other hand, Mateu has had little opportunity for a social life. Many colleagues live half an hour or more outside the city, meaning they come in for work and leave once they’re done. 

“In Germany, there’s no time for anything,” he says. “Everything takes longer. And you travel farther. On Monday, I have to go to a place 400 kilometres away. You make a lot of money, but you don’t have time for a social life.” 

He pines to return to Spain, to have more vacation time and to be  close to his family. “Maybe in two or three or four years,” he says. 

When Rafa lived in Austria, he, too, was homesick for Spain. Austrian culture was “very serious”, he says. When he first arrived, he was busy working and studying, and by the time he was finished in the evening, he found few places to enjoy night-life. “This killed me,” he says. 

Then, when he started playing football in a local league, he met other economic immigrants:  Italians, Turks, and Croatians, with whom he felt he shared more of a cultural connection than with Austrians. “I was more interested in people who were more or less my style, more Mediterranean,” Rafa says. “I felt at home.”

• • •

SOME TWO MILLION SPANIARDS live abroad. An older generation of Spaniards moved in the 1950s and 1960s, during the Franco dictatorship, to find better-paid work at a time when the country was industrialising unevenly. Today, European cities tell the stories of that first immigration wave. In Brussels, for example, the cobblestoned neighbourhood of Saint-Gilles is home to Spanish bars and restaurants where patrons can easily find pan con tomate, tortilla española, and croquetas de jamón. 

Another significant emigration wave took place during the financial crisis. In 2007, about a million Spaniards lived abroad. Just thirteen years later, that number has more than doubled. The country’s entire population is about 47 million. 

Raúl Gil Benito, aged forty-three, was one of the many who fled Spain during the financial crisis. The Cantabrian moved to Berlin and recently returned to Spain after nearly four years abroad. While in Berlin, he met many Spaniards who, like himself, were waiting for the opportunity
to go home. 

Drawing from his own experience, Raúl and several colleagues who lived abroad created the organisation Volvemos, or We Return. The organisation aims to help Spaniards plan their return to Spain, through everything from job searches to networking. In the meantime, Volvemos helps make expat life easier for Spaniards, by connecting them with language resources and helping them navigate healthcare, among other initiatives. The organisation has a database of about 12,000 Spaniards living abroad. 

“We are engineers, architects, construction workers,” Raúl says. “And also obviously nurses, doctors … we are all profiles,” he explains, referring to the range of Spaniards Volvemos represents. Like him, the people who move abroad typically do so for work conditions and better pay, but, “above all, the reasons for returning are personal,” he says. “For culture, for family.”

The number of Spaniards abroad has for years functioned as a metric of the country’s economic stability. While during the crisis, thousands left to seek a better life in countries that were more economically stable, Raúl now points to a bright spot in the numbers. In 2018, for the first time since the financial crisis, more people moved to Spain than those who moved out. 

The caveat to that “bright spot” is that not all of those who move to Spain are homesick Spaniards returning home. In fact, as El Pais noted in 2017, the vast majority of “net migration” to Spain is made up of economic migrants – both legal and illegal – who see Spain itself as a gateway to a better life.  Such people include the more than half a million Romanians (the largest EU immigrant community) and African horticulture workers whose plastic and wooden huts dot the Andalusian countryside. These immigrants are the B-side to this story: picking and packing the fruit and vegetables eaten in Brussels and Berlin – just as Spaniards like Rafa serve drinks, wait tables, and sort through cardboard. In both cases, insecurity and hard labour are weighed against the possibility of a better life.