Let’s ask ourselves, for example, if subsidizing rent and explaining that this will emancipate young people is true. Let us ask ourselves if there can be emancipation without good wages. No. And there are no good salaries without good companies. And there are no good companies without policies in favor of their implementation, expansion or competitiveness. Let us ask ourselves – Obtain who you are, municipalities and institutions asks – if when a company – small, medium or large – presents you with a project – put solar panels, expand capacity, make an auxiliary warehouse, modify the interior of the warehouse without touching the volume – do your best to make the reversal or go into “airplane mode.” There is everything in the vineyard of the Lady Administration, but of all the people who make up this protected and difficult to alter ecosystem there are those who do not dare to decide when a procedure is not regulated. And there are those who were born to find problems with each solution. There are also extraordinary ones, but this is not an article to praise them, but to ask them, also, if they are comfortable among a forest of trees that charge the same despite not all making the same shade.
Nor can there be emancipation without good training. Professional and university training. And the uncomfortable question is whether we have it. If the professional training offers enough courses and that they have an accredited labor demand. If the university courses are updated to the requirements of the real world. The news on both issues is not very encouraging. And we are the country with the most youth unemployment in the European Union.
Let us ask ourselves why, and we try to undo the thread of the reasons that lead us to the podium of the catastrophe. Let’s ask ourselves if going backwards and stopping requiring B2 English from students who finish the degree equalizes in competition, serves as a consolation for someone and, above all, if it modifies the requirements of companies when hiring young personnel. The answer is no. Not because it will maintain the gap between children who can afford English and those who cannot. Not because there is no consolation in mediocrity. And not because companies will continue to ask for English out of necessity or as a filter when hiring.
Let us ask ourselves if the rain of millions that should have come from Europe will change any of the structural deficits that we have as a society
The slogan that requires B2 from students creates a gap between those who can pay for private classes and those who are not is fallacious. Let us ask ourselves how a law that began work ten years ago to be approved in 2014, and that made this mandatory, was not linked to the investment necessary to incorporate English throughout the educational cycle. Governments have had years to make it possible, and they have not. And now they explain to us again that only a few can study English, as an excuse to shake off the responsibility of not having forced the structural change that education needs. Ask them if what has happened is that they have not dared to force the teachers of the study – these yes, scholarships if necessary – or if they have not promoted the incorporation of foreign teachers into our teaching to favor a real immersion in the English language. It is paradoxical that our nurses or biotechnologists can go abroad to work, but foreign primary and secondary teachers cannot come here en masse to immerse themselves in teaching our young people.
Let us ask ourselves if the rain of millions that should come from Europe will change any of the structural deficits that we have as a society. How much money to inject to digitize training and trainers? Can you learn trades in duality with the company in an easy way? Can we make sure that the kids who get lost when they don’t even finish ESO can go to be apprentices in companies? Will we take advantage of digitization to reduce procedures and waits of months and years when approving investment projects, be it in works or industrial facilities? Reindustrialize with incentives to bring back production that we no longer do today? Will we invest in renewables so as not to depend so much on outside energy and to be more competitive?
If the answer to these questions is not affirmative and forceful, we are heading for a scenario of a theoretical shower of millions that will continue to dope the Spanish economy without addressing the reforms that society needs.
And these recipes are too similar to those that have not worked for us, to which we can add the traditional ones of fiscally tightening those that are controlled by the payroll, leaving holes for those who are not, discouraging personal savings and spending more than what you enter expecting a miracle that will not occur.
I will leave for the end a comment on the statement that I have made in reference to the need to invest in renewables. And I no longer do it in question mode, but I need to do it in alert mode and resounding affirmation: to give up installing renewable energy intensively throughout the country is a monumental mistake that we will pay dearly for. And if not, look at the electricity bill for the next few months.
Ferran Falcó, president of the Restarting Badalona association
