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05/13/2008: "Westerners working more for less reward"

Across Spain, France and Italy, young middle-class professionals with good degrees and diplomas are facing a lifetime on low salaries with unrewarding jobs, forever poorer than their parents.

According to Chauvel, 41, a sociologist at the National Foundation for Political Science, for the first time in recent history a generation of French citizens aged between 20 and 40 can expect a lower standard of living than the one before. 'Mileuristas or babylosers: it's the same story,' he said. 'They have an average of three years more education than their parents, a worse job and a lower standard of living.'

In 1973, only 6 per cent of recent university leavers in France were unemployed; now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled, though the overall proportion of French people living in poverty has not changed. Whereas in the 1960s the poor were mainly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50-year-olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers of 30; the gap now is 40 per cent.

[ The situation is the same over western Europe and the US. And they we are working for the 1% of the population who own 40% of the wealth of the world. This is exploitation. ]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/spain.france?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront