Dani
hasn’t had many early mornings recently. More and more, he has found himself
with nowhere to be during the day; he graduated high school more than ten years
ago, and began working with his father in construction. He goes weeks without
work now, trying his best to find odd jobs, local contracting work, and
fly-by-night dishwashing. But the phone hasn’t been ringing: he is thirty-two
years old, a high-school graduate, and a member of Spain’s new lost generation.
Dani’s
is a common story in Southern Spain. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their
jobs during the financial crisis, as Spain, with its nascent manufacturing and
construction industries, was particularly hard-hit by the credit crunch. Without
banks to lend capital to companies to invest in new buildings, this generation was
quite suddenly out of a job.
Most
of them still are. Youth unemployment in Spain as a whole is over 50%; it’s even
higher in the South where Daniel lives. The national unemployment rate hovers
around 25%, the highest in the European Union; in 2005, the unemployment rate
in Spain was 9.2%, only incrementally more than the EU average of 9.0%. Average
income has dropped 4% while the cost of living has increased; seeing people in
aging designer clothes foraging
in the trash outside of grocery stores is commonplace. All of this,
concludes a recent Cáritas
report, has caused a “notable drop in well-being.”
The
narrative in the United States has been one of recovery since the height of the
crisis; in Spain, it has been one of cuts. Austerity measures imposed by Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy in conjunction with European Union officials and the
European Central Bank have seen the ranks of Spain’s unemployed
swell to 5.78 million people in October, up from 5.69 million in September,
and 2.6 million four years ago.
If we
have learned anything from the crisis in the United States it is that a
financial regulatory system should not be based on outdated political policies
like “too big to fail”—that regulatory regimes must be regulatory. In Spain, we can see the human cost of these failings;
in Spain, we can see with particular clarity that the real effects of a
financial crisis are on the day-to-day lives of the working class.
It is
time for a new perspective on economic crises driven by this understanding. It
is time to engage thoughtfully with the human costs of crises—of austerity
measures imposed by governments that disproportionately harm the poor, of cuts
to vital social services that leave young people like Dani with nowhere to
turn. It is time to view the effects of financial crises through a human rights
lens.
