There but for...

Today I helped our friends Francisco and Dolores move out of the apartment from which they were evicted (because Francisco was taken advantage of by a big construction boss and lost a horrible amount of money and his apartment) to a new one they're renting. There were lots of helpers and we worked all day, from 8.30 in the morning till, in my case, 6 in the evening, with a short break for pizza. When you move out of an apartment in Spain (and many other European countries), you take everything with you: water heaters, air conditioning, sinks, ovens, light fixtures... so there was a lot to dismantle, as well as a lot of furniture and an incredible amount of stuff to put into boxes and bags.

At one point, everyone left in vans and cars to take the first load to the other apartment and I was left with the upstairs neighbour taking down curtain rails, which turned out to be very complicated, slow and tiring (because of the position you had to put yourself in). The neighbour's wife was helping and when we'd finished I said I needed a rest and a beer so we started talking and once again I started to remember how little we pampered middle-class Canadians really appreciate the sorts of lives such a lot of people have to lead, even those who seem to be living normal lives in so-called advanced economies.

I mentioned I was retired and she said I don't think we'll ever be able to retire. You have to work legally for thirty odd years to get your full state pension and she'd spent the first 13 years, from age 16 to age 29, working for someone who didn't declare her. So no social security contributions for all that time, nothing that would count towards a pension. And it's almost worse for older people, she said. If you get laid off at 55 like her neighbour just did, and you can't find a job, so you can't contribute for the last years, you don't get a pension at all. (If you're poor enough, you do actually get a special one, maximum about $450 a month, not much to live on.)

Her husband's firm just got rid of him under a new scheme in Spain (ERE) that lets a firm make you redundant without paying you any compensation because they promise to take you back if they can, so you get some unemployment pay, but not the full amount because the firm keeps paying your benefits, so you're kind of laid off but still attached to them. You don't get full unemployment until the firm goes bankrupt, which didn't take long in this case apparently, so he's been on full unemployment since February, no prospects of a job (he's in construction), and no one seems to know what happens to the normal compensation.

She's very happy though because she finally got a legal job cleaning schools. They can't give you more than a year's contract, of course, and then you have to go on unemployment for four months before you can start again, but by filling in for people who have taken leave for some reason, you can sometimes actually work during the four months that way and she's ended up working all the time for three years. Actually when you think about it, she said, we've been very lucky.