With a masters’ degree in publicity, the 24-year-old has been working for more than two years, full-time, in an internship that is starting to feel like it will never end.Paid 300 euros a month for the same work as the salaried public relations professionals who sit next to her, she doesn’t earn enough to move out of her parents’ house and her bus pass and lunch expenses eat up most of her pay.But despite feeling her multinational employer is flouting rules that limit the use of worker contracts with no benefits, she’s not about to complain to the labor office since she considers herself blessed to have a job at all.”Since I was little my parents urged me to get a university degree to find good work. But I’m lucky to have any work at all. There were 30 of us in my graduating class and I’m one of the ones who is doing the best with their career,” Silvia said. She did not want her last name used in case of repercussions at work.With Spain’s youth unemployment higher than 40 percent and its overall joblessness the highest in the European Union at one in five, young professionals accept any conditions as they try to start their careers.The story is much the same in neighboring Portugal and Italy where more and more people have so-called junk jobs: temporary contracts that used to be common in tourism, farming and construction but are now used by all kinds of companies.With the economy sluggish and the euro zone debt crisis strangling credit, businesses are keener than ever to avoid open-ended contracts with expensive severance pay.A quarter of Spain’s workforce is on temporary contracts, as is 23 percent of Portugal’s, compared with a European Union average of 14 percent.In Spain, Portugal and Italy, a rigid dual system has emerged. Middle-aged people have stable jobs with benefits. They are expensive to fire and protected by masses of legislation. Meanwhile, younger workers are stuck in a revolving door of temporary contracts that are easy to abuse.The two-track job market is stunting economic growth, studies show. Temporary workers get trapped for longer and longer periods without benefits, which affects output and makes southern Europe less competitive.”You cannot just leave one segment of the labor market fully untouched and not motivate people to go to the job where they fit best… you might create employment in the short term but in the end it’s a dead-end road,” said Ton Wilthagen, a labor expert at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.1000 EUROS A MONTH AIN’T SO BAD AFTER ALLThe curse of the mileurista — the Spanish-language term for a temporary worker who earns a thousand euros a month without benefits — is not new. Young professionals in southern Europe have found a permanent position elusive for some time.But the lost generation has wandered deeper into a maze as the euro zone debt crisis intensifies. Economic growth is slowing again and public sector jobs are disappearing as governments try to bring huge public deficits under control.”We used to talk about mileuristas like it was a bad thing. Now it’s good. A 1000-euro a month temporary contract is decent,” said Jose Maria Marin, labor expert and contemporary history professor at Spain’s National University of Distance Education.In Rome, 27-year-old Federico has moved from one temporary job to another since he graduated in history in 2009. A 1000-euros-a-month is starting to look like an unobtainable dream.”I was interviewed today for a one-year job but I didn’t like it because they were offering me 500 euros a month to work 10 hours a day,” said Federico, who did not want his last name used since prospective employers could search for him on the Internet.So far he has held out for a job in his chosen field of media or marketing. He wants to move out of his parents’ house but he needs a permanent job contract in order to sign a rental agreement. With more than a quarter of Italians from 15-24 years old out of work he’s starting to get desperate.”Sometimes I feel frustrated, and I start to send off lots of CVs, even to companies I don’t like, just so I have more chance of finding something,” he said.The phenomenon of young people living with their parents is another thing holding back economic growth, creating a vicious cycle for job creation. If they were setting up new households they would be stimulating the housing market as well as consumer spending.Another risk for economies with high percentages of temporary workers, notes Wilthagen, is that banks are shy of lending to people without permanent employment, further holding back consumption.FOOT IN THE DOORTheoretically, a temporary contract is a foot in the door to prove yourself as a good hire.But in southern Europe many supposedly temporary hires renew contracts year after year and do the same jobs as the permanent hires around them, just without the job security or benefits. This creates an enduring second-class job tier similar to the phenomenon of “permatemps” in the United States in the 1990s.In Spain only 20 percent of temporary contracts led to permanent positions in 2008, one of the lowest rates in the European Union, according to a study by Ruud Muffels, a labor market expert at Tilburg University. His analysis of Eurostat data showed that mobility was better in Italy and Portugal.Pedro Portugal, a labor market expert at Nova University in Lisbon, said conversion rates of temporary contracts to permanent ones have decreased in Portugal to under 20 percent from 50 percent in the late 1990s.Many Portuguese companies abuse a freelance contract called the “green receipt,” using it to hire full-time, in-house workers, said Joao Labrincha, an organizer of marches earlier this year against state austerity measures.He said that “green receipt” workers often have fixed schedules like any other employee, but have no right to holidays, social security, health insurance or severance pay.Even the government misuses the contracts.”I’ve worked for the state under green receipts for more than five years. The system is rather perverse. Many of my colleagues are also under these precarious conditions, some of them have been temporary workers for the last 10 years,” said a middle manager at the Portuguese Institute of Museums, who asked not to be named.It’s difficult to transition into a permanent job when no such posts are being created. In Spain, 80 percent of new job contracts signed in the last decade were temporary contracts — businesses just aren’t creating permanent positions.”Firms tend to link temporary contracts, to chain one after the other, with the effect that very few young people get transformed from temporary to permanent. This has a very negative impact on young people starting their careers,” said Anita Woelfl, economist with the OECD.ANY JOB IS BETTER THAN NO JOBIn 2010, under pressure from the European Union to reform its labor market and make it easier for companies to hire and fire, Spain’s Socialist government passed reforms meant to phase out temporary contracts and make permanent contracts cheaper for employers.But less than a year later the government did a U-turn after the 2010 reform failed to put a dent into the country’s unemployment rate, which continued to rise.”We’d rather have people on a temporary job than without a job,” said Labor Minister Valeriano Gomez when the government rolled back the reforms, introducing new rules that allow companies to extend some temporary contracts for up to three years.Spain is becoming a country of people who are “apprentices until 33 and can’t retire until 75,” said union leader Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, criticizing the new rules, which included a new type of contract that gives companies more leeway to hire trainees for extensive periods with no benefits.The extended trainee contract was designed to retrain jobless men now in their late twenties or early thirties who dropped out of school as teenagers during Spain’s housing boom to work in well-paid construction jobs until the building sector collapsed in a pile of bad debt.In Portugal, where the jobless rate is 12 percent, significantly lower than Spain’s, the government has stuck to reforms that reduce and cap severance pay.Juan Jose Dolado, an economist at Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III, said Spain should have kept its eye on the long-term goal and moved the country toward a one-contract system with phased-in severance pay benefits.”It was like crossing the river and being in the middle. They got scared in the middle, they didn’t move forward to reach the other side, they went back,” Dolado said.The Socialists, expected to lose November 20 general elections after eight years in power, are now campaigning on pledges to crack down on abuse of temporary contracts.The center-right opposition People’s Party, or PP, poised to win the November vote, says it wants to revive the original labor reform and move Spain toward one type of job contract, such as the one Dolado envisions.But analysts say the PP may also flinch when it comes to cracking down on temporary contracts because they worry the short-term effect will be to put people out of work at a time when joblessness is the top concern of Spanish voters.Meanwhile, workers like Juan Francisco Seller, will continue to give their labor away, hoping a “real” job materializes. Seller is 27 and has a pharmaceutical degree. He’s been working for free in a hospital in Valencia for a year, doing research with a laboratory team.He has turned down paid work outside of his field, in order to keep his C.V. professional.”I’m one of those who have patience and I’m really clear that other options don’t appeal to me and I really like this field,” he said. But “in the end it drives you crazy.”
UEFA’s plan to spread out fixtures during international weeks makes perfect sense and should bring an end to those strange weekends during the season with no top class soccer, when I find myself watching rubbish old B-movies and darts.
The idea would see a national team play on Thursday for example and then Sunday, or Friday and Tuesday like now or Saturday and Tuesday.
The “week of football” as UEFA dubs it will also mean the big soccer fans can watch lots of live international football day after day rather than trying to catch the highlights of 20 games all played one one evening.
Clubs can’t moan either as they will still be getting their players back on a Wednesday before a club match as currently happens after the reasonably recent change to play second matches of international double headers on Tuesday.
The only downside to the plan I can see is that national coaches will get less preparation time following weekend club matches if their first game is on a Thursday.
UEFA also wants to harmonise kick off times for qualifiers which makes a lot of sense too.
Everyone knows that Champions League games in the club sphere start at 1845 GMT but looking at Friday’s Euro 2012 games, they start at 1600, 1700, 1715, 1800, 1900, 1915, 1930, 1945, 2000, 2030 and yes the obligatory Portugal at 2100 (when do they ever get to sleep?)
That programme is impossible to follow (as the UEFA Cup was a while back) but if they all kicked off at once, with a reduced fixture list anyway because the matches will spread across the week, no one can get confused.
I might be able to sneak in another B-movie though.
PHOTO: UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino
Starving the beast is a favorite conservative strategy for forcing cuts in federal spending. The idea is to deprive the government of revenue in order to force spending cuts  and resistance to new taxes is a central feature of the current Super Committee deliberations in Washington.
Advocates for older Americans are watching closely to see how the committeeâs work might lead to retirement benefit cuts via a higher Social Security retirement age, smaller cost-of-living adjustments or higher Medicare eligibility ages. Meanwhile, a separate starve-the-beast exercise goes mostly unnoticed: a big squeeze on the administrative budget of the Social Security Administration (SSA).
The SSA is funded through the same Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax that pays benefits, so it doesnât compete for general revenue to meet its costs. But Congressional appropriators â who oversee its budget â have been squeezing the agency anyway.
In fiscal 2011, Congress provided the SSA with about $1 billion less than requested by President Obama. Those cuts forced the agency to make cuts that beneficiaries have noticed. It suspended mailing of the annual statement of benefits, and it shelved plans to open eight new hearing offices to handle the backlog of disability claims, which has soared during the recession.
SSA had planned to restore the statement mailings in fiscal 2012 to people over age 60 not yet receiving benefits   but that wonât happen Âif Congress doesnât provide adequate support, says SSA spokesman Mark Hinkle. (The agency currently is operating under the second continuing budget resolution for FY 2012, which expires Nov. 18.)
This may sound insignificant, but itâs not. The benefit statement provides a valuable annual reminder of what you can expect to receive and how benefits are calculated  and it prompts us all to make Social Security part of our long-range retirement plans. For now, the alternative is to use the SSAâs online Retirement Estimator, which gives you a personalized projection of future benefits.
Hinkle says the SSA also has responded to the tight budget by reducing employee overtime by 80 percent. That has cut into the amount of time available to help people who come into SSA local field offices for face-to-face services. The agency also lost about 1,600 workers last year who canât be replaced due to a hiring freeze.
Another major concern is processing of Social Security disability claims, which have soared in recent years. Unlike retirement benefit applications  which are handled in near-automatic fashion  each disability application is reviewed for approval. The average time for processing claims had peaked at 532 days in 2008, but SSA had cut that back to 346 days as of September this year through increases in the capacity to hold hearings. In FY 2011, the agency issued nearly 800,000 hearing decisions, an increase of 45 percent.
But that figure could fall as much as 400,000 in fiscal 2012 even if agency funding is held steady, according to the union that represents SSA workers. In a recent letter to the Super Committee, the National Council of Social Security Administration Field Operations Locals (part of the American Federation of Government Employees) outlined an array of negative impacts of budget cutting. Along with the threat to disability claims processing, the letter described potential further cutbacks in working hours and services.
What does it mean? Less face-to-face assistance for thousands of seniors, widows, disabled people and the poor â many of whom canât easily resolve their benefit issues over the phone of the Internet.
Starve the beast? Indeed.
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Besides dealing with Europe and slow growth, one of the
components of the G20 plan will be to boost demand, with
exchange rate flexibility being part of that. The official said
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would emphasize that when he meets
Chinese Finance Minister Xie Xuren in Paris.
“We will study how interesting it can be to us,” he told
Reuters.Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore wrote on Thursday that
InterRAO was looking to acquire Sorgenia and had hired
investment bank UBS as advisor.
It’s that time of year when the tech industry flocks in droves to that dreary, grey German city called Hanover to celebrate the sector, to make deals, to network and connect and to round it all off in the evenings with swanky company dos, right?
Well, that used to be.
We know that CeBIT has lost its glam factor, its lustre — even if it still claims to be the world’s No.1 tech and IT fair. And, alas, we know that the industry is increasingly shifting its focus to the much hotter trade shows in Spain and the United States.
In hindsight, could it have been a desperate attempt to ward off the slide into oblivion when CeBIT invited Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to open the fair last year?
Or a sign of times to come?
Schwarzenegger symbolises a mix of Californian innovation and Hollywood glamour. But the state he governs is in a budget crisis and some are asking is California America’s first failed state?
Not a comforting sign.
And then there’s this: Germany’s very own chancellor Angela Merkel said what has been on the mind of industry experts for years now, given a massive decline in visitors and the absence of top executives.
“It hasn’t always been easy and even now, one has to be hard-nosed about it — it is still the (sector’s) biggest tradeshow, but one does feel the breeze of the competition, ” Merkel said, speaking at this year’s CeBIT opening ceremony — the 25th since its inception.
Merkel also said that she wanted CeBIT to remain the industry’s biggest event, looking forward to the fair’s 50th birthday (that would be in 2035…).
Yet, if the top-dog barks, it’s clear that something’s not right.
What do you think, where’s CeBIT headed?
Does it have a future or will it sink into oblivion?
