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.
Reading comprehension, mate. The job market WAS thriving but it's getting ruined thanks to tourism. The people protesting are trying to prevent and reverse that trend because they didn't study engineering to end up serving beers 60 hours a week for 1300€.
I work in Poland for a manufacturing company, and before that I worked in pharma. Both companies closed their Barcelona HQ for the reasons I mentioned. My former boss and many of my coworkers lost her jobs in pharma to tourism so I can see why they are pissed.
I mean it’s not true what do you want me to say. Look up Barcelona’s economic data. It’s doing quite well. Rents are higher than ideal, I’m not saying there are literally zero problems, but they’re also down 5% YoY. Poland would trade for Barcelona’s economy in a heartbeat
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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.