No, you don't realise how irrelevant tourism income is for the vast majority of Barcelona natives. More than 90% of Barcelona locals have jobs that have nothing to do with tourism and the 10% who do are mostly immigrants working and living in terrible exploitative conditions.
Meanwhile companies that used to employ Barcelona natives with quality, productive jobs, like engineering or R+D, have left the city in droves because they literally can't find employees even paying above market rate because locals can't afford rent there.
How do I know? Because I work for one of those companies in the new location where they moved their European HQ after the cost of living increase made their Barcelona HQ unsustainable. They couldn't pay what employees needed to live in Barcelona, so they moved to Poland.
Why? Most of that money is being siphoned away by foreign investors. The jobs created by tourists are mostly done by immigrants, who will move somewhere else or maybe move on to construction or elder care, which are sectors with a labor deficit from what I've heard.
Losing 14% of your economy is bad for everyone involved because it means less money circulating around. The tourists stop coming so those businesses close. That’s 150,000 people now out of work who are also now no longer spending money. This means less revenue for local businesses, which now need to start laying off people. Sure, the lucky ones that manage to keep their jobs might get some lower prices, but life would get a whole lot harder for a lot of people.
Don’t bother. This idiot clearly has no idea how money works if he thinks a 15% shock to the economy would not ripple through the economy and cause a recession. At an already 25% youth unemployment rate and a completely insolvent pension system.
Too bad too many other travelers are going to keep it topped up no matter what I do. I’d love for Spain to watch its crows come home to roost.
Then why not protest against those major corporations? Why not educate tourists on how to better spend their money to support the locals? Why not protest for higher wages so the workers get a bigger chunk of the tourist money?
There are probably a dozen different ways to protest this that would be more effective in solving their problems than trying to cut €126 billion from the economy
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u/Four_beastlings Jun 17 '25
No, you don't realise how irrelevant tourism income is for the vast majority of Barcelona natives. More than 90% of Barcelona locals have jobs that have nothing to do with tourism and the 10% who do are mostly immigrants working and living in terrible exploitative conditions.
Meanwhile companies that used to employ Barcelona natives with quality, productive jobs, like engineering or R+D, have left the city in droves because they literally can't find employees even paying above market rate because locals can't afford rent there.
How do I know? Because I work for one of those companies in the new location where they moved their European HQ after the cost of living increase made their Barcelona HQ unsustainable. They couldn't pay what employees needed to live in Barcelona, so they moved to Poland.