EyeOnSpain is mostly concerned with the experience of British expats in Spain. There is now a reverse phenomenon going on, as more and more Spaniards come to the UK. Maybe they’ll soon set up their own website: OJO SOBRE EL REINO UNIDO?
Anyway, I met one of these young Spaniards this week – he’s going to give our children an hour’s conversation class a week – and after a month of being in the UK he has found nothing apart from this one hour. It was sad to see how grateful he was for this little job: ‘Gracias por las oportunidades,’ he texted (more than ten people had applied, most with experience of teaching children).
This is one of the consequences of what the criminals in Spain who have stolen vast sums of money, have done to the younger generation. They’ve destroyed their hopes and scarred their lives. But these people are holding their heads high and hoping things will turn and turn soon. In the meantime, they’re getting out of their country in droves and taking any work they can find in the UK.
The phenomenon hit the headlines this month when a 25-year old man called Benjamin Serra Bosch had a ‘rant’ about the position he now finds himself in, as part of Spain’s ‘lost generation.’ Despite having three degrees he’d had to take a job in the UK which included cleaning toilets (also wiping tables and serving coffee). He was particularly upset that some customers were looking down on him, assuming he was only capable of this kind of menial work. His on-line comments struck a chord with many Spaniards both in Spain and in the UK. These are people who have spent time, money and effort getting an education and what for?
It took me back to my own experiences in the late 1980s. I can relate to the position Spaniards find themselves in, although it wasn’t so bad for me that I had to go abroad (I did, incidentally, go to work in Madrid for a year, but through choice, not necessity). But I would say that it has in fact never been a straightforward path from university to the ideal job, as young graduates like Benjamin might assume. My degree was in Social and Political Sciences. What job could I do with that? Like Benjamin I found myself cleaning; in my case private houses. One particular family I cleaned for in Barnes, London, particularly stuck in my mind and my experience resonates with that of Benjamin.
This family had one of those houses which looks immaculately clean when you arrive and where you struggle to make it look like you’ve done anything. There were little silver-framed photos of mummy and daddy and the children on the polished piano which I had to dust along with all the other ornaments, clean the fridge, the oven and vacuum the already spotless carpet throughout the house. The mother was a lecturer in a southern English university and had a way of talking to me like I might be shit on her shoe. Her husband wasn’t much better. Whatever. I needed the money and just cracked on with it, cleaning every Tuesday for several months. Then one day the man came into the kitchen as I was having my 15-minute morning break. He started chatting and, in passing, mentioned that he had studied at Cambridge. That was my opening.
‘Yes, I went to Cambridge, too,’ I said, as I perched on the kitchen stool and munched my way through the little plate of Bourbon biscuits.
‘Did you?’ he replied, surprised. After he’d recovered himself he added: ‘I went to Emma. Where did you go?’
‘King’s,’ I stated, delivering my coup de grâce (everyone knew King’s was better than Emma).
Of course his and his wife’s attitudes towards me changed from that moment on. They now spoke to me as an equal, albeit a skint one from a poor family, who had to clean to make ends meet.
‘It’s too late now,’ I thought spitefully. ‘They should have spoken to me as an equal from the start.’ A person is a human being whatever work they have to do, and some people would do good to remember this.
After I finished my stint of cleaning posh people’s houses, I got a full-time job with MENCAP as a support worker – again unrelated to my degree and this time my duties not only included cleaning toilets. I also had to clean bums! Adult bums! Someone's got to do it, and in fact it is a worthy and important job.
So I have some understanding of what Benjamin feels, when certain fools look at him sideways, but I also think he needs to accept for the time being that maybe the majority of graduates, both Spanish and British, will not find highly skilled work as the jobs aren’t currently there and maybe never have been. They’ll just have to knuckle down doing whatever turns up. I’ve always felt that if you’ve got ‘something about you,’ it will out.
Of course many of the young Spaniards arriving in the UK, like Benjamin, would be glad to get even these jobs. They’re keen young things, doing their best to make a new life; sometimes with poor English (unbelievable given the vast sums of money dedicated to teaching them the language; what on earth are they doing in Spanish schools to make them so rubbish at it?).
So they are taking any work they can get, usually in restaurants and bars, at maybe £5 an hour; trying to make ends meet on that (often with family help). Others are now not even as lucky as that and I fear that so many are arriving that the work supply is drying up (funny how we’ve got so many local youngsters on benefits, yet many of these Spaniards find work in their first week). But good luck to them. Hopefully they can make a life for themselves in the UK for as long as it takes for Spain to get out of the mire. As no-one knows how long that’s going to be, I'd suggest they plan for the long-term…
Update: our lovely young teacher has now found a full-time job as a carer of people with special needs and has said he wants to set roots down in Britain and only return to Spain for holidays.