51% of young people employed
In recent months I have had to work in a number of institutes and, at some point, I have had to talk to the students about the possibilities offered by the labour market. The typology of the students is very varied and in the same city varies a lot from one neighborhood to another, from one institute to another, and also among the students of the same class. Personal, family, educational, socioeconomic and emotional variables influence this diversity. Likewise, all these variables can condition the future academic and professional trajectory of these young people. Young people need stability both in the family and in the emotional sense; moreover, in order for them to enter the labour market under the right conditions, together with training and training for the job, it is essential to have experience and networks, communication capacity, teamwork, adaptability, decision-making and problem-solving capacity, digital skills, language proficiency...; and of course, public policies, programmes for the promotion of resources and youth employment, etc.
There's everything among the students. Some will choose the path of the university and learn the degree they like; others will choose Vocational Training, many times, in the absence of another option, other times. There's a third group of people who live a day, who are not able to imagine their immediate future, who don't know where they'll live next year, where and/or where they're going to work. We have also talked to them about the importance of languages and most of them are clear that, under the heading of the domain of languages mentioned above, Euskera is not one of the languages to be taken into account in the top positions of the ranking.
The Basque Observatory of Youth has just published in 2024 a report that offers a diagnosis of the situation of young people aged 15 to 29 years in the Basque Autonomous Community (CAV) to deepen knowledge of different aspects of the youth reality: demographic context, education, employment and economic situation, emancipation and housing, health, leisure, culture and sport, Basque Country, values and attitudes, equality between women and men. The youth index, that is, the percentage of people aged 15 to 29 years compared to the total population, stands at 14.6 per cent; in 2023, young foreigners represent 15.4 per cent of the youth of the CAPV, the highest percentage to date.
I have looked at two aspects that appear in the report: employment and the economic situation and, on the other hand, the diagnosis of Euskera. And I'm struck by some data. For example, half of the young people employed in the CAV (51.1%) use Euskera as much or more than Castilian. However, 49% of the respondents state that their work is always done in Spanish or more in Spanish than in Basque. The use of Euskera at work is more frequent among young workers than among the 16 to 64 employed inhabitants, among whom the percentage of those who use Euskera as much or more than Spanish is 32.1%.
I have to confess that I found it a very high percentage of people who claim to use Euskera at work. Young workers aged 16 to 29 are concentrated in the services sector, 8 out of 10, according to data produced by Eustat. Do they really use Euskera so much in those works? In addition to this survey, I would like to know some other source of information on the use of languages in the workplace. As far as I am aware, it does not exist and I think it is essential to make a proper diagnosis of the situation. In any case, as long as we do not have more data, we will have to think that yes, half of the young people employed work in Basque as much or more as in Spanish. And English, how much do you use? I don't have data either, but I would certainly say that they use a lot less English at work than they do in Euskera.
How, then, do they combine this use of languages with the perceptions of languages that we see in schools? Many of these young people who are going to enter the labour market in the coming years, especially those in the most vulnerable situation, do not feel connected between the Basque Country and the world of work if they are not very specific professions, but I would say that the opposite is true of English.
There is a great gap between the realities of Euskera and the messages young people receive about them. In fact, it is not only among young people, but given the importance of the process of transition from the educational to the working world in the use of languages, it seems to me to be a group of particularly caring people.
Rober Gutiérrez
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