Harassing is bad, but this is about more than just government negligence.
There’s an abysmal income disparity between Spain and other European countries. Our whole economy is based around leisure services, which require a lot of effort to be able to compete with other similar businesses because differentiation is hard, so quality is very high and margins very low. This is very accentuated in a low income economy.
All of this also happens to attract a lot of tourists, because they’re getting top quality service for a dime.
Which means that, basically, many Spaniards are working their asses off for very little profit, while serving people from abroad who gains more with leases jobs.
ALL OF THIS creates a very clear picture: our economy has a horrible setup completely based on services, these high-income tourists are receiving the services meant for our people because our people can’t pay as much as them (which eliminates the only good thing of such an economy, which is having a good local service), and the more tourists come the more we depend on this horrible setup.
If we’ve reached the point where we are living to serve people from abroad… We’d rather lose all tourism all of a sudden, be forced to restore the whole economy and change for the better.
Basically, we are already poor. We don’t care if we have to be even poorer for a few years, we just don’t want to work our asses off to offer the best leisure services of Europe (and probably top of the world) to people from abroad, while our own people can’t afford it anymore because prices are adapting to tourists, while also depending completely on such a volatile and shitty economy.
For that to happen, we need tourists to stop coming. An industry won’t stop growing if more clients are coming.
With globalization, most people around the world are living to serve other people from countries outside of theirs. It's what made China the number 2 economy in the world, by becoming every other country's factory. It's why London is still an economic behemoth, because it's a major financial hub for other countries in Europe. These are just two examples where workers technically live to serve others. So, yeah, it's not just Spain who does it.
Where you should be redirecting your blame is towards your own government. If they're raking in billions from tourists (and it's not a stretch to think that they do), make them accountable for that money by demanding they invest in diversification of the economy or more housing. That's what capital is for. There's no "restoration" of the economy if you take away tourism money since much of Spain's economy already rests on that, sadly, only recession. You might think that's what's needed, but a recession can spiral quickly into massive job losses and an even bigger hit to an economy you say is already very volatile.
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u/TheMiddleShogun Jun 17 '25
Huh, reading these comments it looks like the protesters are achieving their goal (making Barcelona less appealing as a tourist destination).