Out of Europe’s Long Jobs Crisis, Voices of the Young

I was working as a business lawyer for a few companies in Spain before I lost my job in 2011. I ended up working for a man who owed me 3,000 euros [about $4,000], but he never paid me. So I decided to move to London with about two weeks' worth of savings. The quickest job I could find was as a server in a Spanish restaurant. I expected sympathy from other Spaniards in London, but got none. I was at the bottom of a rat race as all of the other workers in the restaurant had also left Spain and faced similar circumstances. I was fired after about three months because of differences with the owner, but I am a strong person, and I luckily found another job as a waitress in a nice Japanese restaurant. A month later, I filled in as an event planner, and I am currently managing jobs at three venues.

My mother, 57, lives in Barcelona and does not have a job. My sister lives in Germany with her husband, so she and I support our mother. We send Mom €300 [about $400] every month. Last month, my boyfriend proposed to me, and I’m trying to find the cheapest way possible to have a wedding.

Sometimes I wish I were doing something more focused on business law in London. Ultimately, when you spend seven years studying nothing but law, you expect to make a profit out of that sacrifice and to find a good job in that field. In university they tell you that if you put your heart into something you’ll be fine, so it is terribly disappointing not to be able to use my degree. But I’m glad because law school taught me more than just law and ethics. I learned how to think. Now I feel thankful because I’ve realized there are a lot of things in life you cannot learn from books.

After graduating from law school at the University of Limerick and completing an internship in Brussels, I realized how hard it was to get a legal traineeship in Ireland. So I enrolled in a Springboard course, a part-time education initiative offered by the government to help people qualify in enterprise sectors that are still growing and need skilled labor. The program allowed me to take classes in I.T. while continuing to receive unemployment benefits, through which I received about €140 [about $190] a week.

I took the course because I thought it would help me find a good job, but I’m not very technical-minded and it wasn’t a good fit for me. So I applied for various jobs in Ireland, ranging from a legal assistant to a waitress in a coffee shop, but I didn't hear back. My mother could see I was disheartened, so she encouraged me to apply abroad.

I recently took an opportunity to teach English in Jiamusi in the northeast of China. I will earn a good salary and be able to save up to do a master’s degree when I return next year in September. I’m nervous about it because that area is remote, near Siberia. I’ll have a local teaching assistant, but I’m worried about culture shock, too. If the Irish government were doing more to tackle youth unemployment and create jobs for my generation, then I would not have to be in this position.

Ten years ago, my law degree would have been appreciated in Ireland, but my mother reminded me that I could have had a huge mortgage on a house which would now be worth a fraction of the price. My father owned a trucking business that collapsed about four years ago. He only recently got a full-time job as a truck driver. My mother works part time at a place that serves mentally disabled people, and that is where most of the family income comes from.

The financial crisis has had a big impact on my life, on my parents’ lives, on my friends and on the country in general. Because I am unemployed, of course, I cannot think about having children or getting married, much less about buying a house.

Being unemployed for so long has had a negative impact on my self-esteem and makes me doubt more and more my professional capacity. Personally, it makes me feel like a failure. It makes me feel like I have not reached anything of what I was expected to have reached by my age.

Since the crisis began, I have seen a lot of friends and friends of friends leave the country. I see many people sad about this situation, especially the parents of these young people who are being forced to emigrate. Many relationships are being torn apart because of the economic crisis in my country.

My parents have their own business and are constantly afraid of going under. This causes uncertainty, sadness and a huge stress on their lives. They are also constantly worried about me, which makes me sad. I wish I were not a burden on my parents. I recently moved to New York City to look for jobs and internships.

From 2008 to 2010, both my mother and her boyfriend were unemployed because of the recession, so my family had to live off savings and benefits as the debt piled up. In 2008, my mom’s boyfriend, who was a bricklayer, was laid off because of a mixture of the recession and what some say was an increase in competition from immigration.

We didn’t have enough money to pay rent, so in January 2010, when my mother had my sister, she received an eviction notice. My mother tried to appeal through the legal process and went to different agencies for support for months but was ultimately unsuccessful. The local authorities were unable to find us social housing, which is a form of subsidized housing, before the eviction. They had to put my family in a bread-and-breakfast while repairs were made on a unit that was not ready. My sister was 10 months old by then, I was 17, and my brothers were 8 and 2. There wasn’t enough space for me, so I had to stay with my extended family and friends until the housing was ready. It was only recently that my mom’s boyfriend got a job after losing it at the beginning of the recession.

I do not want to make any financial commitments in the foreseeable future because with many jobs having one-year contracts, it is too risky to get a mortgage on a property. I’ve been selected by the Conservative Party to stand in local elections around the same time I graduate next year. I am open to moving abroad. However, nothing is confirmed yet. Despite what happened to my family, I feel I am in the best possible situation to secure a job after I graduate.

At first, moving to Copenhagen was pretty hard. I came with the expectation of finding work as a Spanish teacher at a private academy, but I could not find anything there or at other schools. Everywhere I went, people wanted me to speak good Danish (and I could not wait the time it takes to learn Danish without working). I thought about returning home many times, but I had nothing to do in Spain. So little by little, I learned Danish and taught Spanish to private clients to earn some money.

In March, I opened my own business offering Spanish lessons. Everything then became much more difficult because I have no training in accounting. I had to learn how to run a business while I taught and was looking for more customers. I think the worst part was that I was working 24 hours a day and not even earning enough to cover my housing. Luckily, I had money saved.

I’ve been in Denmark for almost a year now, and my business is doing well, and I earn enough money to live in this country, although I do not think I’ll become a millionaire. And I speak Danish, and I can communicate with people without too much difficulty. I still occasionally think of going back because life here is much harder than in Spain, and I am very lonely, but I guess I'm here because in Spain there is nothing to do. When I go to Spain I feel depressed because I see the situation, and everyone is quite sad.

Provided by Laura Payne

Laura Payne in Karesuando, Sweden, in December 2010.

I left graduate school and struggled to find job opportunities in my field. I took an internship working for a research center in Cambridge. To pay for it, I had taken a job running a bar in the Arctic the winter before. It was dark all day and night, freezing cold, and I worked 12-hour-days, six days a week, for less than minimum wage. It was bloody hard work, but I did get to see the northern lights a lot.

When I did get offered a paid job in development, it happened to be working for the church, which was a surprise for me. My career really took off from there, and now a few years down the line I am working for one of the top research institutes in my field, managing some major research projects and building a reputation for myself. I travel frequently, and I know that what we do here really makes a difference.

Even though I now have a stable job with a good salary, I also have a lot of debt and no savings. I don't think about settling down, having children or buying a place of my own. I know that to really move up in my career I need to stay flexible and be ready to drop everything and move anywhere. It's a sacrifice, but I worked too hard to let things get in my way now.

I have been unemployed since I left college in September 2012. I have been looking for work almost nonstop since then. I have moved away from my family, and I am living with friends. I'm still on social welfare in Ireland, but I am getting only €194 per week [about $260], so getting married or having children or buying a home has never even crossed my mind. On so little money, those things are completely out of the question.

The economic crisis may force me to leave Ireland altogether to search for work, but as the situation is similar almost everywhere, I don't know how successful that might be. Many people that I went to college with have emigrated because of the crisis. I wish them well, but it is saddening to know I may never meet them again.

I have put so much time and effort into getting my master’s degree because I thought it would lead to a good stable job at the end of it. I tailor my C.V. (résumé) to every single job and write my cover letter as professionally as I can, but most of the time I don't even get a response back from the employer. It's unbelievably disheartening to have put in so much effort over the years but to have effectively nothing to show for it. The whole situation makes me feel worthless and useless.

I have done a few interviews and prepared as well as I could for them, but I haven't gotten any positive news from it. When the employer tells me he won't give me the job, he says there were others who had more experience than I had. That's so frustrating because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can't get a job without significant experience, but if nobody will hire me, then I can't get any experience! I don't know what to do anymore. It just makes me really upset and frustrated.

It is still a possibility to leave Ireland. It’s always in the back of my mind. It’s something that’s in the mind of every young person in Ireland.

I was working as a store manager in Athens, making about €1,300 per month [about $1,750]. But when the financial crisis began in 2011, my salary was cut by more than half. Like my friends, I thought about leaving for England or America to find work, but then my father passed away. So I stayed and moved in to support my mother. I couldn’t leave Greece, but I also couldn’t find a job. I quit my job last year hoping to start a small, environmentally friendly business, a biological foods cafe, but the government took forever to grant permits, and the banks weren’t lending.

While living with my mother, I decided to write a book about life in Greece before the crisis. I published the book and have been living off the small royalties that I received. I am continuing to look for jobs, but cannot find anything. It gets discouraging when you can’t find a job and you have been continuously sending out your C.V.'s for a year or two.

Everyone in Greece is compromising for their jobs. People are doing anything they can, even if it is for as little as €300 a month [about $400], without any insurance. Things have become so bad. Many young people no longer dream about the future because many of us are not doing anything in the most productive age of our life. Even if we get out of the crisis, maybe in four years, I’ll be 32, and then what? I will have missed the opportunity to be in a company with upward mobility.

I came back after two years abroad because I wanted to settle down in Italy. I was really excited about starting a new chapter, but day after day I've realized that the conditions of the economy are worse than what I thought. I am living with my family because I have no job.

In general, the situation is quite depressing because young people don’t look at the future with hope. They see only a big black hole, and that’s it. It’s very scary. Sometimes I think it’s like the beginning of the last century, when people were forced to go to America because there was literally nothing here. Of course, things have improved since then, but again, you are forced to leave if you want a future. So it’s the same situation.

Julian Jimenez Nunez

Magdalini Christia, right, upon graduating with a master's degree from City University London in 2007.

I left London after working as an engineer for a year because it seemed easier to bond with people in Greece. Now I once again have a full-time job as an engineer in London after taking the decision to permanently leave Athens. After feeling like a financial refugee who was deprived of opportunities for years, I feel like I’ve completely turned over a new leaf. It is easy to forget the crisis here sometimes, although I have to still pay off my expenses back home in Greece.

The first time I was in London was before the crisis. I left because the Greeks are warm people and I thought it would be easier for me to find a partner, have a family and still have a career there. So I moved back home and started working there in 2008.

Around 2010, when my company asked me to cut down on my working hours, it became impossible to find a full-time job, just short contracts. On top of that, the government considers engineers self-employed, so I could not receive any unemployment benefits, but still had to pay taxes. While I was jobless, I got married to my boyfriend on Nov 26, 2011. Just a few days later, the political party he worked for, the Socialist Pasok party, stopped paying its employees. For the past two and a half years, he has shown up to work in the hopes he will get paid, but he has been given peanuts every seven months.

After just a month and a half into our marriage, I decided to move back to London to look for a job. That was the beginning of a traumatic experience. I remember crying every day. I felt trapped in London. My husband felt trapped in Athens. After a couple months, I got an opportunity back in Athens, so I took it. But my husband had changed: His nerves and heart were broken because of the financial crisis. He was in a bad phase, either withdrawn or having oral outbursts, which made the whole relationship different and unpleasant. We divorced after seven to eight months of marriage. I strongly believe that if these financial problems weren't here, I would have children by now and be happy. Now that I’m in London trying to make it for myself, finding love is just not part of the plan right now.

When I was younger and decided I wanted to be a journalist, I thought I would graduate, start writing at a local paper and work my way up. Maybe even have my own place in my 20s — the way you hear everyone else does it. To support myself through university, I worked as a health worker in methadone rehab clinics in some really horrible areas of Glasgow. I did years' worth of unpaid internships, hoping that a position might come up, but nothing did, so I applied and went into Columbia University for a master’s degree in journalism.

Since I graduated last May, I have found a full-time internship and freelance work. I really do love it here and feel there’s a commitment to taking young people on. The standard of living here is much higher than back home. On one hand, I see this as an adventure, but on the other, I miss my family and think about whether I’ve put my life on hold and when I’m going to settle down.

I have work authorization that extends until May 2014, but I don't know whether I'll be chucked out of the country or not because I'll have to get a new work visa, which isn't easy. So having simple things like a boyfriend or a lease on an apartment seems futile.

The psychological impact of knowing I could be confined to my parents' home lest I become homeless, knowing that I can be as educated as I like and be stuck in a dead-end job, and knowing that things may never improve is incredibly burdensome. That would be my reality if I were to return home at this point.

Salah Hamzeh

Oliver South and his friend Eveliina Karhu in Garden City in Cairo.

With a degree in history, I would have ideally wanted to be in the academic field and pursue a Ph.D, but it was hard to find funding. I was working for the retail branch of a bank while going to university, so I continued to do that after graduating. I wasn’t considering a career in the government, but the changing economy forced me to apply for jobs that I wouldn’t have considered before. Now I work at the British Embassy in Cairo, mostly doing administrative work.

Although things have been tough in Cairo within the last year, I am really enjoying what I do. I think one always has to fulfill this element of “doing their time,” so this is just a small part of doing less attractive jobs to move up. I am supposed to come back to London in the next couple of years, but I hope to do some more postings so I can climb the ladder. While I am working overseas, I can save money so I can use it to buy a house later.

My girlfriend works for the marketing department of a theater company in Canterbury, near London. For me, moving back to London would be a challenge because the rent prices have gone up. I would think very carefully about getting married with the traditional ceremony because the average cost is 15,000 to 20,000 pounds [$24,000 to $32,000]. I would rather use that money to buy a house. And I would have children only if I owned my own place and could afford them.