Two years after being laid off from
her job as a health and safety consultant, Ana Luis has found a new, quite
different occupation. The blue-eyed, blonde-haired 46-year-old stands busy in
the window of her very own dress shop in Valladolid, north-eastern Spain,
deftly fixing clothes on a dummy.
For Ana, it was a childhood dream
come true - one born of the nightmare of redundancy.
Left jobless like millions of
others in Spain's recession, she did what many are also doing, for want of an
alternative: launched her own business.
"I had a choice: stay sitting
at home and do nothing, or throw myself into a project that I like," she
says.
She opened the store less than four
months ago using part of her redundancy pay and savings - a total investment of
30,000 euros ($40,000).
She is one of a wave of Spaniards
trying to create jobs for themselves in the recession that has driven the
unemployment rate above 26 percent.
The crisis sparked by the collapse
of Spain's building boom had wiped out a lot of self-employed entrepreneurs:
625,000 between 2008 and 2011, says Lorenzo Amor, president of the small
entrepreneurs' association ATA. But in 2012, as the unemployment rate climbed
to record highs, their number grew for the first time in the five-year crisis,
with 53,000 new registered self-employed, he says, citing government figures.
These entrepreneurs created 72,000
jobs, he added - just about the only sector to do generate any.
"For the next few months it is
going to be easier to create your own job than to find one," Amor said.
"In Spain, every hour 67
people register as self-employed. Unfortunately, half of those don't manage to
keep their business running for more than three years."
Despite everything, they are having
a go.
In a trendy district of central
Madrid, serving staff bustle at the coffee machine in "La Bicicleta",
a novel bicycle-friendly cafe where cyclists can park their bikes. Its tables
are crammed with customers even though the cafe only opened days ago, under the
management of Tamara Marques, 29, and Quique Arias, 35.
"I had other job plans. I
wanted to be an air traffic controller. But the labour market is nothing like
it was," said Tamara.
"The way the economy is, I
prefer to invest in something I really like and which will bear fruit, rather
than wait for the government to do something for me."
She and Quique launched their plan
in late 2011 and managed to open their cafe, with its rough industrial-style
decor and deliberately shabby armchairs, more than a year later.
They raised the 100,000 euros they
needed through a rare bank loan and help from their families -- no thanks, they
say, to Spanish bureaucracy.
"We're not even talking about
getting subsidies or making it easier to get a loan," says Quique.
"We're talking about much simpler things, like just getting the paperwork
done."
Among its various emergency
reforms, the conservative government says it is working on a law to cut the red
tape for people launching their own businesses.
Ana, Tamara and Quique say they are
covering their costs but relying on their families to live.
Yet theirs are rare tales of hope
in a crisis that aid groups has thrown millions into poverty.
"I think there is a growing
dynamism. We are seeing just the tip of the iceberg," says Javier Sanz,
director of an MBA programme at Madrid's Complutense University.
"In the next five years people
are going to realise more and more that to find the perfect job they are going
to have to make one up. For that you need to be an entrepreneur."
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