Cáritas Española has warned that families with less income invest more than six out of every 10 euros (63%) in housing, supplies and food expenses. With a document titled Income and expenses: an equation that determines our quality of life and presented last week in Madrid, it also warned of the existence of more than three million households (16.8% of the total) that remain below the severe poverty threshold once these basic expenses have been paid.
This is the case of Laura Martínez, a 48-year-old mother from Rioja who collects 800 euros from unemployment and has a mortgage of 700 euros. She currently lives in Villamediana de Iregua —a municipality bordering Logroño—, where a few years ago she bought a house. “At that time my salary allowed me to cover this expense alone,” she explains. But then she fell ill, she was forced to take sick leave and, when she joined up again, they fired her.
In figures
- 4,8 Millions of people live under the severe poverty line in Spain
- Three Millions of households remain below the poverty line after paying the mortgage
- 2,5 Millions of people do not make ends meet despite having paid employment
- 16 % of the rental population experience an extreme level of financial stress
- 1,2 Millions of households sublet rooms in their house to pay for the apartment
- 63 % of the expenses of families with less income pay for housing, food and supplies
Overnight, Martínez was left with nothing. “I didn’t qualify for any help and spent four months without income.” Until Cáritas appeared, which included it in the Accede project, aimed at people who do not have access to any social benefits. They offer help with the most basic needs, train users socially and professionally, and facilitate their social integration. Thanks to the intervention of Cáritas Diocesana de La Rioja, Laura managed to start collecting unemployment benefits: 800 euros which, after applying the equation that gives the report its title—income minus expenses—remains at just over 100.
—How do you survive with that amount?
—Juggling and dispensing with things that are not necessary. When shopping, for example, I don’t usually go with my son because it hurts you to tell him that you can’t buy cheese. At the town festivals, if the boy was able to go on an attraction it was because it happened to be his birthday and they gave him a trip. And then thanks to Cáritas, which has helped me a lot in what I needed. There are months when they have paid my mortgage. On other occasions they have bought me some material that the child needed for school or food.
Poor workers
Like Martínez, Victoria Pacico also has a hard time making ends meet, but this 42-year-old Equatorial Guinean, however, faces the same financial problems despite having a paid job. What happens is that “I’m working very few hours,” she confesses. She has an 11.67 hour contract as a bus monitor at a special education school. “I have to watch the minutes my daughter spends in the bathroom with hot water to prevent the bill from going up more than necessary,” she laments.
“In Spain we have a precarious labor market, with high levels of partiality and temporary employment.” This, together with the “low quality of salaries, means that we have one of the highest numbers of poor workers in Europe.” According to Daniel Rodríguez de Blas, a member of the Foessa Foundation study team – who presented the report together with the general secretary of Cáritas Española, Natalia Peiro -, “we are talking about 2.5 million people who, despite having a job paid, their income is so low that it does not allow them to escape situations of poverty.
Subarriendo and infravivienda
In this context, citizens try to balance the equation as best they can. In an attempt to raise their income, more and more families are resorting to subletting some of the rooms in their house to third parties. In just five years, the percentage of those who use this formula has skyrocketed, reaching 6.6% in 2022, which represents more than 1.2 million homes. The Cáritas Española report also warns of a “worrying increase” in the use of inadequate homes, which are those that do not meet the minimum decent conditions for daily life. They have gone from 25% in 2018 to 30% in 2021; That is, there are 5.6 million families living in this situation.
For the charitable entity of the Church, the solution to this set of intertwined problems is to expand the number of social rental housing or emergency housing. It is also necessary to “plan and coordinate employment policies” in such a way that they are focused on groups with more complicated access to the labor market. On the other hand, they propose “addressing job insecurity from a comprehensive perspective”, as read in the proposals chapter of the report. This implies reducing the temporality of contracts and the partiality of working hours. Finally, Cáritas Española proposes “establishing a minimum income guarantee system with sufficient coverage” and that offers “sufficiency in amounts.”
2023-11-16 02:51:30
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