The psychological barrier has been breached, but the regional government would like to suggest that it has not been. The national statistics office would beg to differ. According to it, unemployment in the Balearics has not only crossed the 100,000 Rubicon, it has embarked on the invasion and is scaling the ramparts. Ok, this is an over-statement; it’s not as if a point of no return has been arrived at, but it sure as hell must feel like it to those in the dole queues. The statistics office maintains that the number out of work stands at 112,000, one in ten – approximately – of the islands’ population. Or to put it another way, at just under 20%, one in five of the registered working population, and that figure doesn’t take account of the self-employed who are also feeling the pinch.
The government reckons that unemployment has peaked. It may have, for the time being, though an improvement in figures is unlikely to show up for some while, until seasonal employment kicks in. Even that, however, disguises the true picture, and that is the lack of employment opportunities which summer work only helps to obscure. Recession has exacerbated the situation, clearly it has, but it has also exposed the fault lines of the local economy – ones that should have been obvious to anyone, even politicians, seduced by the boom times but apparently incapable of counteracting seasonality.
The national government, meanwhile, is flailing around, desperate to find any measure that might reduce its massive budget deficit and to assure the markets that the Spanish economy is not the same basket case as Greece’s; oh how the temporarily mighty have fallen. One ploy is to raise the pension age to 67. Fine, assuming there’s any work for the 65 year-olds to continue with. Another is to increase indirect taxation. For an island – Mallorca – and a nation for which tax avoidance is a past-time, this is insane. It might, questionably, mollify the markets, but it will do nothing for employment creation.
Mr. Bean is cutting an ever more awkward figure. When elected for his second term in 2008, Sr. Zapatero had promised full employment. There wasn’t a hope in hell’s chance of that, especially not as the crisis began to consume everything in its path. And even were there “full employment”, what would it look like? A few months work as a waiter and then back to the off-season dole queues, paid for by the burdensome levels of social security that are a brake on much employment creation. Were there to be an election now, chances are that the PSOE would be obliterated, bringing into office – by default – the singularly uninspiring figure of the PP’s climate-change-denying Mariano Rajoy. You might remember him; he’s the one with a relative who holds a position in a university who doesn’t reckon much to the climate-change argument, and so Mariano used that as the basis for his own argument. That’s about as good as it gets.
But also meanwhile, Sr. Zapatero can at least walk the European stage during Spain’s EU presidency term. The central government’s science and innovation minister has announced, as part of the programme for the presidency, that research and development and innovation should be at the heart of European recovery. Good for her. Ah yes, innovation, technology, research and development. Now, wasn’t there something about all that two or three years back? Not from Madrid, but from the regional government. Whatever happened, do you suppose? Could it be that funding just had to be diverted to bolstering the rust-bowl industries – construction and hotels during time of crisis? Industries that are at the heart of Mallorca’s seasonality. And so it goes around, and around, and around, the circle remaining unbroken.
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