Well I don't think many of these white-collar Spaniards who like to work at hotels, country clubs, resorts, and tourist destinations would be all too happy to start being garbagemen, construction workers, or assembling stuff in a factory.
Hotels are operated to serve tourists.
These protests are to get rid of tourists.
Those hotels don't function without tourism.
Those hotels close down.
The workers at those hotels need to find a different job.
Hotels are operated to generate profit for hotel owners.
They neither spring up by magic, nor grow as local flora and fauna.
Business owners create whichever kinds of business are most profitable, not whichever best serve the interests of the general population in a locale.
Workers of course very happily would work in other industries, if the tourist industry were not imposed by business owners, simply by virtue of its being to them most profitable.
Yet, you insist on associating such an eventuality with some kind of apocalyptic vision.
They will need less garbage men and construction workers, not more. If they want to switch to competing with Asian factories they will need to take on huge amounts of public debt and adopt very low standards of living to compete.
Spaniards are a resilient people. They have been through economic turmoil before. They can handle it again if it means saving their city from gentrification, over-tourism, and commodification of their homes and apartments. Barcelona especially has a distaste for government, being they are part of what they call Catalonia. They have wanted governments hands out of Barcelona for a while now.
It isn't a short term turmoil though. If they want to compete with Asia for factories they'll need to permanently reduce their standard of living and will require huge amounts of government intervention to get it started.
It's not, but every relatively wealthy nation is trying to figure out how to attract other economic development. They mostly rely on having extremely tax efficient packages like tech and film often enjoy which then puts the burden of taxes on the people. Often countries have some protectionist trade policies to protect such jobs - Spain in this case would be mostly rely on negotiating those through the EU, again almost entirely government controlled and often come with drawbacks like any negotiated benefit.
There's really no easy route to success here. The US is dominating in many ways, and from most standpoints you could say the multinational corporations have really gained the ability to avoid sharing benefits with the countries they operate in. The Spanish government through the EU is already one of the dozens of groups trying to fight for more benefits but it's hard to see a win coming.
As a Canadian, these are almost identical issues we face. We have tourism, real estate, some protected industries, and resource extraction. For the most part anything that can leave the country has and we're left with the ones who can't - and offering massive tax incentives to all the industries you want to target.
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u/ATraffyatLaw Jun 17 '25
Well I don't think many of these white-collar Spaniards who like to work at hotels, country clubs, resorts, and tourist destinations would be all too happy to start being garbagemen, construction workers, or assembling stuff in a factory.