I've recently watched Les nouveaux pauvres : Quand travailler ne suffit plus/The new poor: when working is not enough. An interesting documentary about something well known (I've watched some other French documentaries on the same topic), poverty in Europe is not only suffered by those that can not find a job, but also by those that have a work that does not pay enough. Of course this is a "soft-poverty", these people are not homeless and do not starve, but they strive to manage to pay their rental and get decent food and clothing, and have to renounce to many small things that make life worth. Furthermore, they live in a constant state of insecurity and stress, not sure about whether the next month they'll have yet that source of income or things will get much worse. This population subject to this constant insecurity, precariousnes, is called the precariat.
The part that shocked me the most is the story of the Swedish retired woman striving to make ends meet. I was already aware of how retirement days can be rather far from being a golden age in some "advanced" countries:
- In Spain retired people with a very low income are usually either self-employed workers (that are the absolute parias of Spanish social system) or people that did not manage to work for at least 20-25 years (if less that 15 years you are not entitled to a normal pension, but you are supposed to get access, under certain circumstances, to a very, very basic "social pension"). Otherwise Spanish retirement pensions are, as far as I can see around, pretty fair.
- Regarding France, I'm aware of farmers that after a whole life of very hard work, all they can get is a 1000 euros retirement!
- As for Germany, I watched a documentary some time ago where they explained how those old people picking up used glass bottles on the street (this has become a part of the German urban landscape) are usually people with a low retirement that need extra money to make things work. Similar things happen in Israel, where old people need to continue to pick up jobs after the official retirement age.
But the case of the Swedish woman shown in the documentary really caught me by surprise. This woman worked most of her life (as a social worker precisely), raising her child as a single mother (for that she stopped working for a couple of years, which seemed to hurt badly her retirement rights), and now she has a 1000 euros retirement (that's not bad in Spain, but we're talking about Sweden!). She is entitled to renting a social flat, but well, life in Sweden is not cheap, so that still means paying 600 euros for that rental... so not much left for the month. She is also entitled to having lunch for a "cheap" price in a restaurant managed by social services (the same social services where she worked most of her life), so well, she gets by... but that's far from the life quality that you would expect for someone in the Scandinavian paradise...
What infuriates me more is that I'm pretty much aware of the enormous amounts of money spent by the Swedish social system in recent migrants. I continue to don't give a shit about someone's skin color or place of birth, but I think there are things that should give you higher entitlement to receive help from the Social System. Having contributed with your taxes to that System: you, your parents, your grandparents... or in a broader sense, having contributed to that society, make you part of it, and it's more than fair that you receive from it. However, a person freshly arrived is a new citizen that has not given anything yet to that society, so it's for sure good and necessary (of course I'm talking about immigrants willing to assimilate) that this society helps you, I call it solidarity, but I honestly think that the "old" citizen should have some privileges over you, I call it fairness.
