Spanish unemployment

Cut & Furious: Spain 25% jobless to be sacrificed for euro?

Spain is causing a headache to investors, with pressing concerns it may require international aid to help handle its debts. The government is implementing a big austerity programme there, at a time when almost a quarter of the workforce is unemployed, and recession is knocking on the door once again. And as Jacob Greaves reports from Madrid, the way the authorities are dealing with the crisis, is leaving people raging in anger.


Prostitution in Spain borders on modern-day slave trade

While the economy struggles, the sex industry is booming, writes Suzanne Daley

SMH,

8 April, 2012

She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived in Spain two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her get here - a man she had considered her boyfriend - made it clear that the job was on the side of the road.

He threatened to beat her and to kill her children if she did not comply. And so she stood near a roundabout recently, her hair in a greasy ponytail, charging $US40 ($38.80) for intercourse, $US27 for oral sex.

''For me, life is finished,'' she said later that evening, tears running down her face. ''I will never forget that I have done this.''

La Jonquera was once a quiet border town where truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.

While the rest of Spain's economy may be struggling, experts say prostitution - almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women - is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $US2500.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men - many of them travelling in packs for the weekend. ''The young used to go to discos,'' said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona's counsellor for women and civil rights. ''But now they go to brothels. It's just another form of entertainment to them.''

There is little reliable data on the subject. The United States State Department's 2010 report on trafficking said 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain - 90 per cent were trafficked.

But police officials and advocates say whatever the number of victims, it is growing. Thousands of women are forced to work - often for even lower pay now, because of the economic downturn - everywhere from fancy clubs and private apartments to industrial complexes and lonely country roads.

Fuelling the boom in the sex industry in Spain are many factors, experts say, including porous borders in many parts of the world and lax laws. Until 2010, Spain did not even have a law that distinguished trafficking from illegal immigration. And advocates say arrests of traffickers and services for trafficked women remain few.

More importantly, some advocates say, is the growing demand for sex services from younger tourists. Of course, there is a local market. One study cited by a 2009 United Nations report said 39 per cent of Spanish men admitted having visited a prostitute at least once. It is widely accepted here for business meetings to end in dinner and a visit to a brothel.

But more recently, experts say, Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services. In La Jonquera, tucked behind an all-night gas station, is the newly opened Club Paradise, which, with 101 rooms, is one of the largest brothels in Europe. It caters in large part to young men from France, where many aspects of prostitution are illegal, and perhaps more to the point, buying sex is more expensive.

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say most of the women are controlled by illegal networks - they are modern-day slaves.

The networks vary enormously, and shift constantly. Some are ''mum and pop'' operations out of eastern Europe, like the one that controls Valentina. Others have far greater reach, such as the Nigerian organisations that first began to surface in Spain in the past decade. Deputy Inspector Xavier Cortes Camacho, head of the regional anti-trafficking unit in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family members back home.

But Mr Cortes said people of maybe a dozen nationalities were involved in the trafficking. Until recently, for instance, the police in Barcelona did not even realise Chinese mafias ran prostitution rings in the city. Then they began noticing more and more advertisements for Chinese, Japanese and Korean women - all of them, it turned out, Chinese - working in a network of about 30 brothels.

The New York Times

Greece: Pay for the privilege of working!

It's Official - Greece Unveils The Negative Salary, And A Whole New Meaning For "Pay To Play"

Zero Hedge,

22 February, 2012

We thought we had seen it all. It turns out we hadn't. The country that gave the world the alphabet, philosophy, and plates with funny sexually ambiguous drawings on them, has outdone itself again. 

Because beginning this month some Greeks will have to pay for the privilege of having a job. 

From the Press Project:

Salary cutbacks (called "unified payroll") for contract workers at the public sector set to be finalized today. Cuts to be valid retroactively since november 2011. Expected result: Up to 64.000 people will work without salary this month, or even be asked to return money. 

Amongst them 21.000 teachers, 13.000 municipal employees and 30.000 civil servants.

Needless to say the BLS is salivating at the prospect of US workers paying for a job, as this will immediately allow them to double count said person's role in the employed part of the labor force (which incidentally has shrunk by 1% in the time it took to write this), as the money said "worker" pays can be used in the BLS hedonic models to theoretically hire many more people courtesy of fractional reserve lending. 

Now if only everyone would agree to pay for the joy of playing Solitaire 9 to 5, then all the world's problems would be solved.

Civil unrest in Portugal

Indignados march hits Lisbon again

Press TV

Around two thousand demonstrators came to the streets of Lisbon to say: Basta! That's Portuguese for.."Enough!" Enough to austerity measures, enough to precarious jobs, and enough to the lowest incomes in Western Europe.

Eurozone crisis

Eurozone strains increase with grim new economic data

Italian bond rates and Spanish jobless numbers rise, while Belgium and four other countries face fines for size of deficits

the Guardian,

6 January, 2011

Strains within the European Union intensified following another round of damaging data that showed a jump in the Spanish unemployment rate and a rise in the interest rate that Italy pays on its debt to unsustainable levels.

Spain's jobless rate jumped to almost 23% in November, when the rate for the European Union rose to 10.3%. Italian bond yields, which act as a proxy for interest rates, reached 7.19% on further worries about the state of the economy and the government's ability to pay its bills.

The grim economic news, which included a fall in retail sales across the eurozone and a surprise drop in German industrial production, sent leaders scurrying to agree further measures to shore up the euro.

Italy's prime minister, Mario Monti, met the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris to discuss a pact between eurozone countries due to be signed in March, giving Brussels oversight on debt levels and allowing it to punish countries that breach the rules.

France said it was prepared to press ahead with a financial transaction tax, despite resistance from the UK and other EU members. Presidential adviser Henri Guaino said France would take a decision on the "Tobin tax" by the end of January to set an example for the rest of Europe.

François Baroin, the finance minister, said the aim was to have a tax in place this year, at least in France. "Decisions will be taken by the end of January as far as France is concerned," he told RMC radio. "France will take the lead on this issue. We will see how it can be applied."

The European commission, the EU's executive branch, is preparing the ground for greater fiscal union. It has already indicated it is prepared to get tough ahead of the deal, following publication of a list of five countries that face heavy fines for breaching current rules on budget deficits.

A spokesman said the commission had yet to reach a decision on what steps to take against Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland, which are all expected to have deficits in excess of EU limits this year, "but we will do it very soon". EU rules mandate that budget deficits must not exceed 3% of gross domestic product. Countries with deficits higher than that can be fined.

Meanwhile, Belgium's finance minister, Steven Vanackere, was locked in talks with the commission's high command on Friday night in an attempt to prevent EU officials imposing bigger public spending cuts. The commission has described Belgium's 2012 budget as too optimistic.

Belgium has promised to cut its budget deficit to 2.8% of economic output this year, from about 3.6% in 2011. But the commission believes it cannot meet this target unless tax revenues or spending cuts are increased.

The commission's criticism is a particularly sensitive issue in Belgium, where political parties took more than one and a half years to set up a government, which was finally sworn in last month.

Vanackere told the commission the government was determined to meet its fiscal targets this year. But Belgium has one of the highest debt loads in the eurozone, and analysts fear it risks being dragged into the currency union's debt crisis.

Under EU rules, Belgium must also spell out how it plans to reduce its debt to below 60% of GDP over the long term, from about 100% currently.

"It is normal that the commission is asking us questions," Vanackere told reporters outside the government offices. "The budget was set up at the end of the year at high speed. It was not the normal way to do things."

Belgium, Malta and Cyprus all face sanctions; the non-euro countries Hungary and Poland will escape financial penalties but could face tougher entry requirements should they join the euro.

The economic picture across Europe has worsened this week, with the exception of Germany, which enjoyed falling unemployment and strong business growth in December, and France, which also saw a rise in output at the end of 2011.

Retail sales for the bloc fell 0.8% in November, according to data from the EU statistics office, Eurostat. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a monthly fall of just 0.2%.

The volume of sales fell more sharply in Germany, the eurozone's largest economy. Germany also suffered an 8% contraction in industrial production output, which analysts said was an indication of weakening export markets in the far east and China as well as the eurozone.

Eurostat said the bloc's unemployment rate of 10.3% in November was the same as October and up slightly from a year ago, when it was 10%. That compares with an unemployment rate of 8.5% in the US and 8.3% in the UK.