Domingo Fernández Veiguela, CESI vice-president, deplores Spanish youth unemployment

Domingo Fernández Veiguela, CESI vice-president and President of Honor of the Spanish CSI-F, compares today’s situation with that of five decades ago. “In the 60s hundreds of thousands of Spanish workers with very little training emigrated to countries like France, Germany and Belgium. Over time most of them returned to Spain. Now it is their children who are leaving to look for work the world over, especially in the UK and Germany”, Fernández says.

Over the last three years it is estimated that some 300,000 people have emigrated. Unlike their parents, however, these young people are university students or graduates, engineers or doctors with a lot of training and good language skills. Despite their qualifications, these young people make up a significant number of the five million people who are currently unemployed in Spain. “The economic crisis is turning them into a lost generation”, Fernández deplores, “48.5% of our young people are unemployed, even though 1.5 million of them have been through higher education”.

Millions of immigrants, particularly those from South America, also account for a significant number of the jobless. Since they worked in low-skilled jobs, they were the first to become unemployed. “In the short term the solution looks tricky despite the confidence the majority of the Spanish people have entrusted in our new government”, Fernández declares. “It has promised to bring the deficit under control, adapt the education system to meet the needs of the labour market, boost active employment policies and modify labour relations by making contracts and collective bargaining more flexible”. Fernández has announced his intention to closely scrutinise the government’s efforts.