The Broken Hopes of a Spanish Generation

Lorena Dominguez, 23, is a former automobile worker who lost her job when the local Peugeot-Citroen car plant shut down in her home town of Vigo, Spain

Pep Bonet / Noor Images for TIME

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Like Ireland, which for more than a decade boasted growth rates three times the E.U. average, Spain's once booming economy has been hit especially hard by the downturn. Spain's GDP is expected to shrink 1.6% in 2009, and the first place that young people feel the contraction is in their purchasing power. "Kids today have grown up with consumerist expectations and feel frustrated when they can't maintain them," says Alberto Saco, sociologist at the University of Vigo. "But more frustrating is what is happening to their expectations about work and housing." (Read: "Ireland's Economy: Celtic Crunch Time.")

Portela and her friends are certainly aware they have more to worry about than shopping sprees. Paula Rodríguez, 20, is studying journalism. "But there aren't any jobs in that, so I'll probably just stay in school longer and get another degree," she says. The prospect of owning a home — and the mortgage that comes with it — makes all four girls laugh, so far-fetched does it seem. "How am I going to get a mortgage if I can't even get a job?" scoffs Rodríguez.

The lack of decently paid jobs for young Europeans is one of the continent's great failings, a phenomenon so broad that in country after country people have coined shorthand terms to describe a generation frustrated by its plight. In France that term is jeunes diplômés. In Greece, Generation 600. And in Spain its members are called mileuristas. "The mileurista," explains Daniel Lostao, president of the Youth Council of Spain, "is someone who earns €1,000 ($1,300) a month, despite all their education and training. They've got master's degrees and speak multiple languages, but they can only get a low-end job, where they're lucky to earn €1,000 a month. It makes you wonder: what's the point of going to university if you're going to end up a cashier?" (See pictures of a Spanish village.)

Thwarted ambition is not the only problem. One of the dirty little secrets of Spain's boom years was the number of people Spanish firms employed on casual contracts. In an effort to make its labor market more flexible, the country has the highest rate of temporary jobs in the European Union: one in three. The great majority of those "trash contracts," as they're called by locals, go to the young, making them the easiest (read: least expensive) workers to fire. None of this is new. Young people have complained of being mileuristas since Europe adopted the common currency and the general precariousness of many jobs has long forced a kind of prolonged adolescence, with adult children living in their parents' homes well beyond graduation. But the recession is scaling back even the limited opportunities casual positions offer. Not only are there fewer jobs available — Spain lost 620,000 positions in 2008; 124,000 joined the ranks of the unemployed in March alone — but those that remain are earning even less. "People here wish they were mileuristas," says Iolanda Velasco, a Vigo city councilwoman. "They're 800-euroists." Velasco, who oversees the city's youth programs notes another change. "The cutoff age for our workshops and training sessions was 30. But because the age [people leave home] keeps rising, we just changed it to 35."

Little wonder that people like Jenifer Fernández are so depressed. When the 
 23-year-old started her university studies in sociology at the University of A Coruña in 2005, her parents could afford to rent her a dormitory room and, later, an off-campus apartment. But when their budget became tighter last year, she had to move back home. Now she commutes to school, a 90-minute train ride away. Fernández doesn't see any end in sight to her dependency. "My father worked as a machinery operator, my mother is a housewife. They put me through school so that I'd have a better life than they did," she says. "It's really hard for them to understand why I can't find a job." She's given up her goal, at least temporarily, of becoming a sociologist and is instead considering joining one of Spain's last refuges of job security: the paramilitary Guardia Civil, which functions as a kind of national police force.

See pictures of General Motors factory-scapes.

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