NINIs or Slackers?

[chanel]

Estudias o trabajas?” When young Spaniards gather around the bars and patios, that’s their traditional icebreaker line: “You study or work?” In the past year, it’s become almost mandatory to answer, with a self-effacing smirk: “Nini.”

It is half a joke, for nini is a way of saying “neither-nor,” and NINI is the Spanish government acronym for “Not in education or employment” – that is, lost to the economy.

But it’s not really a joke, because now almost everyone is NINI. The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.

An entire European generation is leaving school to discover they have no place in the economy.

To a young European, that story is incomprehensible. The European Dream – in fact, the European Assumption if you’re a middle-class university graduate – is the permanent employment contract. North Americans change jobs seven times in a lifetime, on average; in Europe, the average and the expectation is one job per life.

A full-time job with a permanent employment contract is not a period of work; it is the guarantee of a life, a lifestyle and a world. You start with a full month of paid vacation every year, and that can easily double within a couple of years when overtime is taken into account. It’s almost impossible to get fired (Spanish employers need to pay you nine weeks pay for every year you’ve worked) and it’s rare to leave a job: It’s what you are.

Short-term and casual work is for poor immigrants and unschooled villagers, beneath the dignity of anyone whose parents had a full-time contract. (Even now, at the height of the crisis, ethnic Spaniards aren’t taking such jobs.) Small-scale entrepreneurship is still exotic.

This financial crisis is putting an end to the European Dream. Last month, Spain began scrapping its full-time contract. France is sure to do the same and, in Greece, it’s become meaningless. Europe, when it gets out of this mess, will no longer be divided into a small elite who are sheltered beneath a lifetime-job cushion and a large platoon (often with different skin colours) who hustle for pay; it will be all hustle, all the time, the way we learned to do it in a previous century.

Nini and the European Dream - The Globe and Mail

Are we there yet?