Pidgin 101

One of the things to which innocent foreigners in Spain must learn to adapt, even if they have gone to the trouble of making themselves fluent in the language, is the often very tenuous relationship that words here have with the reality they are intended to depict. To haul out an example from the overmuch-parodied Iberian attitude towards time, the reader might consider the expression, ahora después. Literally, and unambiguously, translated in to English as 'now later', the speaker uses it to give the listener assurances concerning when a certain event (for example, the repair of a broken water pipe) will take place. Noting that the construct gives its user a tremendous amount of leeway before he could rightly be judged as an incompetent and devious prick, one could easily interpret this as being a self-serving lie but, because of the pervasiveness of these verbal inventions in Spanish usage, we doubt that this kind of cynicism is actually warranted. What imaginable advantage to its utterer is offered by telling someone, for example, to carry and place something to the sysiphean location, payá pacá (transliterated, no point in looking it up or commenting on our spelling) - 'over here, over there'?

On the other hand, one would be a fool not to ascribe evil intent to the fairly widespread Spanish belief that 'unemployed' and 'working' are not mutually annulling states.

In this regard, both aficionados and professionals of the now wildly popular blood sport, macro-economics, will have noted with some glee that the unemployment rate in Spain has recently managed to make it to the 13% level and, better still for those looking for divine justice on the Costa del Sol, nearly 19% in Andalucía. Quite obviously at levels that echo the Great Depression, this latter figure is up from the 2006 record low of 11% - we repeat, 2006 record low of 11% - occuring in a year in which (if we recall) it was estimated that 350,000 foreigners, being a number almost equal to the unemployment rate itself, were also labouring in the sunny south. The question concerning how 11% unemployment translates to full cannot help but pose itself.

The answer, oddly given the introduction to this piece, lies in the Andalusian trick of being rich and poor at the same time, and the effect this has on electoral politics and the region's relationship with the European Union. In the first case, Andalucía has found itself governed by the same political party and the identical president for almost the entirety of its democratic history - despite the fact that the PSOE is categorically not the people's choice in most of the provincial capitols. Power is won through the overpopulated rural towns and the best way to ensure that this continues is to not force country folk to look for work in the city. The political policy that accomplishes this feat is the non-enforcement of laws governing the receipt of unemployment benefits - particularly that peculiarly ill-conceived one that says that if one is working one is not eligible. Votes paid for and delivered thus, the Junta de Andalucía can now turn its attentions to Brussels, flashing its credentials as an officially disadvantaged region on the basis of this untreatable lack of jobs to bring home the subsidy bacon - later to be reconstituted to its original raw pork, thrown in a barrel, and distributed amongst the hungry faithful.

A more realistic look at the unemployment rate might have placed it at something along the line of 4% (an acceptable full employment figure, we think) in 2006. And currently? If it is any indication, the present olive harvest in this part of Andalucía is more than ever in the hands of immigrant labour, of which there is a huge surplus seeing as what is left of the under-the-table positions that they occupied in the boom are being taken by some not inconsiderable percentage of the recently dismissed Spanish workers.

One would be less than rigorous if he or she were to assume that this scenario is not replicated to one degree or another throughout the country. After all, even in the good times, the underground economy was thought to be 25% of the official.

And one more doubt... the graph at the top of the page shows the raw unemployment numbers for the agricultural sector from 2004 to the present. The red line at the top represents 2008. Was there a drought that we missed, did people stop eating - or did somebody inadvertantly open the hotcold spigot?

Chart courtesy INEM.

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