Generational clash: €2,500 pensions vs. housing crisis in Spain

Generational clash: «€2,500 pension and a third-world country»

Born after 1955. They never knew hardship, ate three times a day, and had access to all services. Having satisfied their biological needs for reproduction, they expect to collect a €2,500 pension. According to the diagnosis opening this discussion, what they leave to their children and grandchildren is a third-world country, with violence, murders, and rapes happening as if nothing were wrong, non-existent pensions for when they have enjoyed theirs, and families destroyed by divorces and unscrupulous conflicts. The reproach is not new, but the harshness with which it is formulated is.

What exactly is blamed on the baby boom generation

The starting point is an accusation on three fronts. First, housing and wealth: it is argued that those born in this bracket bought apartments at prices that are now unreproducible and now rent them out or pass them on as inheritance while their children cannot move out. Second, pensions: the recurring complaint is that they will receive benefits that the system cannot sustain for those who come behind. Third, the deterioration of public spaces and services, attributed to decades of political management without correction.

The most repeated response from the other side is that this generation did not find anything given for free. A childhood is described in inland villages, working from memory: digging potatoes, harvesting grapes, carrying firewood, taking cows to pastures every day of the week and every week of the year, after hours of single-classroom school with a strict teacher. From there, one jumps to the father's entrepreneurial adventure, the appliance business, breaking one's back like beasts. The narrative of self-effort is the shield used to respond to the accusation of privilege.

The demographic argument: boomers as a vote bank

There is a line of analysis that tries to take the discussion out of the sarracena ground and into the arithmetic. Boomers are the majority demographic group. Therefore, thanks to democracy, when they were young, investment was made in public education; when they started working, legislation favored workers; when they needed independence, legislation favored building housing; when they rose and earned money, taxes were lowered; and when they retired, pensions were guaranteed. Politicians always did what boomers wanted because they were the largest vote bank. The rest of the people, it is concluded, just trinc along.

That framework has an immediate reply: most boomers did not legislate anything. They worked in construction, hospitality, engineering, workshops, and factories. And a part of that generation was also left out. It is pointed out that it is very difficult to find poor boomers because most of those who ended up ruined in the eighties and nineties ended up alcoholic, with toxic habits, drinking, smoking, eating badly, not going to the doctor, and died long ago. Of the customers of a neighborhood bar who knew the owner's son by name, only four reached seventy. Most, however bad things went, lived in owned apartments already paid off.

The housing mirror: five million pesetas cash with thirty years

The data that generates the most tension is that of housing access. A 59-year-old participant, working since 16, describes his assets: a 350-square-meter house with a pool in a residential area, two more houses rented out all year round, three children, the youngest being 13. His first apartment in Valencia he bought for cash for five million pesetas at age 30. Nobody gave him anything, no inheritances, scholarships, or aids, he emphasizes. The question he throws to those who complain is what he has done in his sad and perversos life besides complaining.

The answer comes via historical comparison. At that time, it is argued, illiterate people got a house in four or five years. Now it takes 25 years or more, and that is if you get a mortgage. It is added that apartments built during Franco's regime also had to be paid for, they were not given away by collecting yogurt lids, and that most who built wealth had two jobs and in their free time coached a sports team for pay, so as not to touch both salaries. The complete calculation, broken down item by item, gives a difference that surprises anyone who reads it fully.

Precarity is not laziness: the labor market that changed the rules

Against the reproach that young people do not want to work, the most repeated answer is that they do want to, but they cannot find it. And here enters a structural factor often overlooked: the legalization of temporary employment agencies (ETT) in 1994, when boomers were already 40, had advanced in companies, and were secure in their positions. From this arises the duality between permanent and temporary contracts: the secured ones heading towards maximum pensions, the young chaining temporary contracts.

The contrast with the effort discourse becomes explicit. It is remembered that at that time there were also those who did not get paid for overtime, neither as extra nor as normal hours, and in return received perhaps one or two days off. Working up to 36 consecutive hours when there is a project deadline was not an exception. The difference is not in the sweat, it is argued, but in that the former sweat bought a house and this one does not.

The internal sustancia ilegal: not all boomers are equal nor are all young people whiners

The issue gets complicated when nuances appear. There are respectable boomers, it is said, good parents, responsible workers and entrepreneurs who knew how to train and delegate, good citizens. They are not many, truthfully, always a minority. And then there is the majority that motivates the reproach: the one that repeats that since I gave you studies and I didn't have them, you must adore me like a god for the rest of my life.

At the other extreme, attacks are also launched against young people. They are described as a generation that had a good time until 30 with masters and degrees paid for by boomers via taxes, and now screams because they have to work. Talk is about a snowflake generation that complains about everything, smokes weed in high school, obsesses over football and concerts, and wants an apartment, a car, and a comfortable life out of nowhere. The conclusion of that current is that the problem is not one generation against another, but shepherds who run the show and create circumstances while the cattle blame each other.

Lack of empathy and talent drain

There is a diagnosis that tries to be more surgical. That boomers broke their backs like beasts is true in many cases. The problem is the lack of empathy towards the situation of young people. Spain is an old and antiestéticarful country that exploits young people in exchange for almost nothing. And the truly talented young person understands that if they want to prosper, they have to leave their homeland, which is deeply unfair.

The practical recommendation repeated is the same as decades ago: learn languages and settle in another European Union country. The warning accompanying it dismantles a cliché: in other countries, taxes are higher, not lower. Every tile, every meter of road, every hospital and every streetlight is financed by them. The tax haven does not exist; there is, at most, a labor market that pays better for the same job.

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The generational reproach ends where it began: nobody disputes that housing access has become brutally expensive compared to four decades ago, and nobody disputes either that a part of those born after 1955 broke their backs to get where they got. What still doesn't fit is why, knowing both facts, the conversation always drifts towards intergenerational insults instead of towards those who legislated each of the rules that made the gap possible.