Counter-revolution

Accidentally, we had occasion to witness the early stages of last Thursday's Madrid euro-demonstration 'against' the crisis, unemployment and pension reality, held under the auspices of various trade unions. Walking down Recoletos towards Atocha station to catch the Jaén cattle transport home (following a reasonably optimistic progress report on the missus' March hip surgery) we found ourselves going counter to the flow of many thousands of flag wavers heading towards their marshalling point - and made some attempt to estimate the typical age of the participants.

Hoping to not pretend to convert anecdotal observation into science, we'll limit ourselves to saying that the under-35 age group that is currently sporting a 30-something percent unemployment rate was not, by any stretch, adequately represented. The group that was out in force, however, might best be characterized as 'pre-retirement'. Our very charitable guess would rate the median age at somewhere north of 45 years old. How far we'll leave to cruel and merciless statisticians to calculate, but there sure were alot of fifty and sixty year-olds.

The effects on both politics and policy of this very unrepresentative representation are evident. The unions, with their considerable political clout via the process known as diálogo social, are fighting tooth and nail to forestall any attempts to make the Spanish labour market more flexible and responsive as demanded by business groups. What they mean by this is that they want no changes to be made to the tenured status of their most loyal constituents, preferring the current situation in which virtually all of the considerable burden of flexibility is borne by the non-unionized legions of precariously, regardless of skills and education, employed. These are the under-35's.

Aside from leaving us, yet again, with troubling doubts concerning the adequacy of the post-WWII western power structure and political process in the present circumstances, we tried to imagine a situation in which young people showed up in sufficient numbers - let's start with the 40-plus percent of total Spanish unemployed that come from this group. In a perfect world, they would be marching up, and not down, la Castellana bearing placards exhorting the oncoming brigades of old folks from the UGT and Comisiones to get out of their way. Now!

Then again, the boomers have almost guaranteed the survival of this earthly paradise by having raised their kids to be irremediably stupid. We can't think of the last time we heard someone under 35 betray the remotest interest in, or even awareness of, policy issues. That would be one of the benefits of the information superhighway, we suppose.

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