May 3: Consumer confidence is way down (20Minutos). There's nothing but very bad news. Salaries are going down if they exist at all and expenses are going up. The latest: the Community of Madrid is going to turn all the local highways into toll roads and government of Spain is raising taxes.
Apr. 17: Spain continues melting down. Read this article in the Wall Street Journal: Pressure on Spain Builds. The brunt of it is that everyone who's anyone wants Spain to make major cutbacks to the economy and the Bond markets punish Spain when it starts to slow down its reforms.
The latest reform is to cut back yet another 10 billion Euros in spending, 7 in public health care and 3 in public education. The autonomous communities don't seem to want to play along with the central government so the next move may be the central government's taking back control over those 17 communities separate systems (34 total). It looks like a good idea on the surface of it, but it's looking like everything's going to deteriorate.
March 15 update: 20minutos said today that the city of Madrid owes nearly 6.5 billion euros.
March 14 update: European leaders don't seem to believe what the Spanish government is telling them so their inspectors came to Spain to check the government's accounts for themselves. There was no word on whether they checked the accounts of the 17 Spanish communities which seem to operate with a heck of a lot of autonomy. Some of them even seem to feel like they're not part of Spain and have huge governments with their respective huge workforces and never seem to be able to meet the objectives that the central government sets for them, except for the Community of Madrid apparently where the train line to Warner Park has been closed down. It cost about 85 million euros to build and it had been costing about 3 million euros per year to operate (20minutos). The provincial government had also invested about 160 million euros in Warner Park itself. It seems it's always operated in the red. Lots of big projects here like this one have been and will be biting the dust in the current race to the bottom. You know things are bad when they can't even afford to keep paying 3 million euros per year to support their 250 million-euro investment.
The European government set the objective for Spain to reach with regard to the deficit of around 8.5%, around 85-90 billion euros apparently. They told Spain to lower it to 5%, around 50 billion euros, but got upset when Spain said they'd only lower it to 5.8% this year. The government said 600,000 (or so) more jobs would be lost this year. You can probably trust that data as much as the European inspectors previously mentioned trusted it. I'll bet they get closer to a million job losses. President Rahoy said (more or less) that his reforms were the lesser of two evils and that the alternative would be 3,000,000 more job losses.
In a related story, the government announced in the BOE (boletin oficial del estado) that banks in Spain would sometime this year collectively (and all at the same time) write off about 50 billion euros from the value of the properties that they currently hold (and cannot sell because they're overpriced). (If you're planning on buying an apartment, wait. You'll save at least 40-50,000 on the deal just like that.)
The GDP (gross domestic product) of Spain used to be about 1 trillion euros. For the moment, the number above seems to suggest that the Economy will shrink by about 10% this year, very roughly speaking, and I'm no economist.
March 7 update: Labor laws have been reformed by the government. It's now much easier and cheaper to dismiss workers. It will even be easier to fire state workers both in the state government (2.7 million workers in Spain) and local autonomous community governments (1.3 million workers in the communities - 430,000 of these didn't have pass any exams to get their jobs). Read in Spanish: El Gran Recorte en Empleo Publico. There is no real plan for "growth" in Spain in the short term. It's all about "austerity" and "cutbacks" at this time. Many of the current economic problems in Spain derive from its BIG government so it would probably benefit from huge cutbacks in the long term.
March 4 update: Local channels constantly put on TV shows encouraging Spaniards to move abroad. Around 5 million people are unemployed now and there's no end in sight. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, one of Spain's greatest authors, wrote this article last year (in Spanish) Los que no salen en la foto. It really captures the anger many Spaniards must feel when their unemployment compensation runs out. Last week their were demonstrations with violence in many parts of Spain. The jury's out on how things are going to end up here.
Jan. 29 update: The recession's turning into a depression in some places in Spain. There's a record unemployment of over 5,300,000 officially speaking, and it's probably well over 6 ml "unofficially" speaking, given how unreliable I've found government statistics to be. You hear nothing but bad news every day. Yesterday, the airline Spanair suddenly closed and sent around 5,000 workers home. Business is down by 80% in the restaurant/bar/disco sector in Seville. Even in the good old days, I've had a company or two drop all the teachers on staff due to cutbacks. Today I see all sorts of trouble coming as students tell me their companies expect something like 0% sales this year.
I get private students these days who are in general somewhat more unreliable than they were in the past. Everyone is freaked out and more cautious, except for a couple who just seem to be rich and therefore totally relaxed and unworried. Nowadays, I get more students who are just prepping for a job interview or an oral exam. As soon as they've passed it, they either drop the class, or cut down to half the number of hours they were doing. The only difference I see is in the IT sector where there still seems to be some confidence left, and sometimes even exuberance. I hear things like "there's no recession" in this sector from them. IT guys usually work too much though so you tend to get a cancelled class or two a month. I find I've become far more tolerant of students who skip classes these days.
Jan. 30: Interesting story today in 20Minutos (and an example of the constant bombardment of negativity in the news), it seems banks here in Spain had been moving up to 1,800,000,000 euros of old folks' savings (without telling them) to the Cayman Islands and now these old folks can't retrieve their money (Compra Productos Riesgo) because they don't have enough cash flow, they say.
Dec. 14 update: The economy here seems to be spiralling inexorably ever downwards. According to 20minutos, 10,000,000 people here live on under 500 euros per-day now and the King told people to look forward to hard times yesterday. I've talked to a couple of people, including an economist, who seem to think there's no way Spain can possibly pay off its debt and there's nothing to do but go ahead and crash and start all over again. tPaul Krugman, a nobel prize winning economist, says he thinks we're in a depression, not a recession. What we need is a good alien invasion to draw us all together (as Reagan used to say).
It looks like the government here is desperate to raise money to pay on the interest on the massive loans that they're taking out (I mean they're selling bonds on the bond markets and then have to pay interest, etc.) They've already been making cuts on everything they can get their hands on (see the "malnutrition" text below) and they've been looking into other "creative" ways of raising taxes. These are some of the things I've heard: The "DGT" (Dirección General de Tráfico - the guys in charge of the highway system), for example, has asked to be able to charge tolls on what have been up till now free highways. Also, at a local level city halls are looking at charging (more, because we're already paying) for more things like for the fire department and police department.
Dec. 15, 2011: The first cases of malnutrition are starting to pop up in public schools: Primeros casos de niños malnutridos en Barcelona. Merry Friggin' Christmas! Soon the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.
Feb. 6, 2012: More and more stories of people migrating abroad are popping up in the news. Some of my own students are in the process of doing so at the moment. As far as I can see, only the sports and IT industries have been left relatively unscathed.
Feb. 11: Posts retrieved from Friendconnect before it was (or "will be"
at this time) withdrawn by Google.
Since apparently Germany is calling the shots, we can expect some cutbacks over the next couple of years. I imagine we can also expect Spanish politicians to befuddle everyone and deny that there's a problem until the problem is blazingly obvious. Remember 2007/2008, when Mr Zapatero won the re-election on a platform of "There Is No Crisis." Oh well, life goes on! Daniel Welsch 10/3.
This below, all results or repercussions of these "cutbacks"!
vefont 9/28. I have a student who is also a teacher in a bilingual school. She is a "interina" which is like a substitute, because she still has not passed the "oposición" with a high enough grade. Let me just give you the rundown on our class history: I have been working with her for the past year on this gruesome test. Early this year they told her the test was in April, then in June, then they changed it again. Then they cancelled it, then they decided they would do it, but not in all of Spain, so now the competition gets fiercer. The test has changed formats probably three times since this past April. Now the test has been moved up to October, which meant that she was worried all summer whether or not she would have a job this year, because she would start the year still being an "interina" which means she gets chosen to teach later than other teachers. So now the exam is supposedly in October. They have changed the format to this COMPLETELY different format than the one she had been preparing for (and paying for in my private classes and in a Saturday "oposicion" preparation course- not cheap) so all that time and energy and money was wasted in essence- when she could have been focusing on her teaching, her child, and the other aspects of her life, or on preparing the correct exam. So, now she will be taking this exam in October (presumably, if they do not change the date again). They have made a general knowledge section on the exam (what is a cell?, who was Charlemagne?, etc.) Something that she was not aware she had to prepare until late this summer, and still is not clear on whether that part of the exam is in English or Spanish. Then the rest of the test, if she passes the first part, will be in English and about teaching, yet this time written instead of an oral presentation (the oral presentation she had been preparing). In the meantime, she was lucky enough to be assigned a school this year. She did not know what she would be teaching until the SECOND DAY OF SCHOOL. Can you imagine your first day not knowing what you will be teaching? How exactly is one to prepare for that? How does this benefit the students. The principal called her in and asked her what she studied and what she could do- she had originally studied music, but has NEVER taught music and is not at all prepared for that. The principal said, "ok, we'll probably give you a music class"- however, she was able to say "no" to this and at least was assigned to a class she was familiar with. So now we have a teacher in a new school, with a new assignment, at least similar to her last one, but with a whole different curriculum, about half of the students in her class come from special needs classes- HALF- and with this exam wavering over her head,in October, at the beginning of the school year- and where am I going with all of this? WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH THIS SYSTEM??? WHO IS THINKING ABOUT THE WELFARE OF THE STUDENTS? AND THE TEACHERS? Apparently NOBODY WHO IS IN CHARGE.
vefont 9/28
I had a student who attended the demonstration in Madrid against education cutbacks a few weeks ago. She was very disappointed at the turnout. Apparently, things will have to get worse before they get better. Thanks for the updates here and elsewhere. Very informative!
William Christison 9/28
Apart from keeping the same hourly rate for the 3rd year running, I have as many classes as last year, more actually as I've taken on a couple more Saturday students. It's the coming year I'm unsure about. So far, ours is far from being the worst sector it seems.
William Christison 12/20
What brought it all about? Nov. 11, 2011.
From what I understand, Spain as a whole is really deeply in debt. The government itself isn't very deeply in debt, but the private and public (individuals and companies and banks and the government) debt together adds up to as much as 410% of GDP. When credit came easily, Spain spent like crazy and now they're stuck holding the bill with next to no way to make the payments. I gather foreign creditors (huge American banks, etc?) were like drug dealers offering cheap crack until Spain was hooked, and they swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Now, they're apparently busy covering the worst of it up: the huge black hole that is the Savings and Loans Banks (S&L), apparently. What people around here tell me is that these banks have been mostly run by politicians (see: Cajas de Ahorros where you can see which political party runs which S&L bank) who got caught up financing the real estate boom until it became a huge bubble and even though international Economics press such as England's "The Economist" were screaming "Bubble" for a year or two or three before the crash, apparently they chose not to heed these warnings and just kept on throwing good money after bad.
I have been rather naively hoping that these politicians didn't really understand what was going on because they were merely politicians after all. But unfortunately these ignoramuses were spending a multibillion-euro business into the ground. What possessed them? I don't know. People around here have told me that a lot of them, or even most of them, were just too closely connected to the real estate industry in the way of direct and indirect compensation or fees or kickbacks or campaign donations or whatever they call it these days.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but I can't think of any other way things might have played out. There's just so much apparently "circumstancial" evidence as to make it virtually impossible for even Perry Mason to defend. In any case, all you have to do is look around at all the evidence of profligacy. There are examples of it everywhere. In my own "dormitory" city (a suburb city that mostly serves Madrid with employees and has very little industry of its own), City Hall apparently recently spent upwards of 180 million euros for a cultural centre. It seems Alcorcón, with a population of 170,000 or so, is one of the most indebted cities of the Community of Madrid, if not of Spain, at 612 million euros 6 months ago.
There are a lot of other new museums and cultural centres and empty, useless and unprofitable buildings that have been built all over Spain. But, the kickers are the loads of empty, useless and unprofitable multibillion-euro airports, high-speed railways and toll highways that have been built, as well as all the regional television channels, and local trams or streetcars, etc.
Also, Spain is not just one united country. It's really 17 countries with 5 different languages. And, each of those has their own government, their own public health system, their own police force (called the Ertzaintza in the Basque Country and Mossos d'escuadra in Catalonia), their own system of education, etc. There's not a duplication of services. There's actually 17 of everything. There were even over 40 local Savings and Loans banks at one time a year or two ago with names such as Caja Madrid and Caixa Catalunya, but these have been merged into under 20 banks now with names such as Bankia and CatalunyaCaixa because of the financial problems they've been having.
So, each of these 17 little countries comes with its own big petty goverment complete with its own huge, expensive entourage. What's more is that some of them have apparently been able to circumvent laws regarding how the State employs civil servants and they have hired 10s of thousands (ElConfidencial.com) of employees without having them go through the normal state-exam procedures and so on. (This smacks of something awfully suspiciously like buying votes, etc. if you ask me.) But, it goes even farther when some of these governments are so actively fostering an atmosphere of local "nationalism" via teaching a Spain-antagonistic (or adversarial) history and rejecting Spanish as their language.
By the way, I don't understand how Spain rates so highly on Transparency International's ranking (and I'm not just talking about the huge underground economy that I've heard so much about from people around here, which they say is as much as 25% of GDP), but this "opacity" is actually a very real nightmare for any multinational company which sets up here. Companies typically have to set up separate offices in each of the 17 communities and even translate their documents to the other 4 languages, going so far as to employ very well-paid official translators. And each of these different governments has to be dealt with differently. If Spain really wanted to attract more foreign companies and save loads of money at this point, they'd start by dismantling most of this top-heavy government infrastructure, but Spanish people tend to tell me that this would be impossible, that it's a hold-over from the period of the transition from the pre-1975 dictatorship. There are lots of excuses not to change around here, which along with the fact that no one tends to know who's really in charge (is it the central government or one or more of the other smaller governments?), really seems to worry "global markets" (I imagine that's what the Economics press calls the foreign bankers/dealers who helped to lead Spain into this mess).
By the way, when you get to a local level, for example just within the Community of Madrid (one of the 17 countries in Spain), you pretty much have the same sort of duplication of services going on, on a much smaller scale but it's still happening. Each city and town in Madrid has its own credit rating and might, for example, have a hard time keeping up with their payments to companies and freelancers for services rendered (i.e. they have trouble collecting). I'd really worry about loaning anything to a city like mine with a debt of 612 million euros, but that's just me - I worry about little things like spending far more than I can afford to pay back. And, of course, I'd worry about others not being able to pay me back.
In any case, each of the 17 different "countries" also has its own credit rating and some of them are just about bankrupt now and foreign companies such as pharmaceuticals are refusing to extend any further credit to them. The curious thing is that each of these little "countries" buys their own medicine, etc. separately. But, if the Spanish public health system were to negotiate their prices together as a whole, wouldn't they be able to get better prices? The same goes for the delegations various communities such as Catalonia and Madrid have built abroad in the U.S., U.K., France and EU, etc. Doesn't Spain already have embassies there as a country? Can't these people work together efficiently, cheaply and effectively on anything? It's absolutely maddening!
So, now the poor people of Spain are left holding the bag. Yes, besides all the other Spains that I have mentioned, there is also in fact a "poor" Spain. Besides the extremely rich 1% (or less?), there's a clear-cut two-tier system in Spain with far fewer employees with well-paid, permanent, ironclad contracts on the one hand and poorly-paid temporary workers with shitty contracts on the other. It's these latter folk who have never earned more than around 1,000 euros a month that have taken the brunt of the recession. Many of these people are barely literate, yet together with their spouses and parents' co-signatures they bought houses at exorbitant prices with 40 and even 50-year mortgages in the bubble years from politician-bankers who must have at least suspected they'd be left holding the bag at the end of it all. They can't just hand the keys back whenever they feel like it like in the U.S. Even if they do so, they (and the people who co-signed with them) will forever be in debt until the loans are fully paid even though many of them no longer have the means to pay, because around 50% of young men and women are unemployed (these are more likely to be part of the second tier or "underclass", in other words), or 25% of the total work force.
Apparently, there were around a million properties on the banks' books when the bubble burst and I've heard that it's down to 700,000 now. The banks had loads of properties which they couldn't write down because it would have shown them to have enormous losses. Even now the prices of these houses would have to drop even further to match the lower tier's 1,000-euro-per-month salaries if they ever want to get the real estate market going again. But as far as I know, the banks have resisted lowering the prices of the houses they were stuck with because that would have meant having to have had to have declared them as losses.
So, we haven't hit the bottom here in Spain yet. First, many banks here and all over Europe apparently bought a lot of CDOs (Packages of AAA-rated CDSs which apparently turned out to be the complete scam which almost ruined the U.S. in 2008 and may still do so at some point in the future because that sort of thing hasn't been stopped) from shameless U.S. banks and as far as I know, none of the banks here have fessed up to their level of exposure. So, if things start to unravel further, the truth may come out at some point, for example, as depositors make a run on their banks as they did in Argentina. Second, like in the U.S., Spain loaned out far too much money that they borrowed from foreign creditors (mostly bankers I assume) and now they have to borrow even more to pay off all those loans. Interestingly enough, those very same creditors who loaned them the money in the first place at lower interest rates, now keep raising the interest rates for new loans. It is rather like a drug-dealer-and-client relationship, isn't it?
If it weren't for the fact that the Greeks are going through their own meltdown, you could say something literate like "beware of Greeks bearing gifts". And, I'd like to state unequivocally that the situation in Greece is totally different from the one in Spain, but I can't. There are just too many similarities and there are just too many people at all levels of government and society involved to say that Spain didn't bring this down on itself. The same goes for Italy's meltdown. But, I just can't help feeling for the lowest tier. They had the least to do with the decision making process, but they are already paying for it more dearly than anyone in the upper tier. But, ain't that always the way of it?
The worst part of it is the fact that even the children of the poor are paying for it with the progressive defunding, dismantling and privatization of the public system of education. The talk is now that this grand recession will go on for another decade at least. That means that an entire generation or two of lower class children will have no chance at all of receiving even a middling education. Politician-bankers here have had no problem finding and spending gobs of cash on things that are profitable to them (literally billions upon billions of Euros). Can't they divert a little away to pay for public school teachers and school lunches? We're only talking about a small percentage of the total GDP. Are these guys disappointing or what!?
And just now I saw on the news that Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Sarkozy are plotting the breakup of the Euro zone. That's going to go down like a lead balloon. Politicians everywhere are just not up to the job. It seems investors in Italy's bond markets are panicking and there's a run going on there. At the same time, it seems Greeks have had a quiet run on the banks going on for the past few weeks. Over 5 billion euros have been withdrawn by depositors and sent abroad. I imagine no one wants to get stuck with euros in the bank when the currency is changed back to the Drachma. I wonder if this is what Europeans felt like in the months preceding the first and second world wars.
Dec. 15, 2001 update: It turns out that the Merkozy couple have been trying to save the Euro zone, not break it up. Cameron in the U.K. is not having it though and the inner group of 17 is going on without his blessing. It looks to me like the British would rather stick with the status quo way of doing business in the financial world (i.e. without any sort of regulations) while the Europeans are fed up and want a bit of government control.
Nov. 21 update:
Book:
This is a rather sobering book published last August about what led up to the Euro-crisis that's currently unfolding over here. I read it after I wrote the entry above and am quite happy, if "happy" could possibly be the right word given the dire circumstances, that I did so. Michael Lewis, the author, really does a good job of putting the whole thing into the proper perspective in plain English. One very chilling bit of information, for example, that he got from an interview with the now famous manager of a hedge fund created especially to bet against the subprime mortgage market - he won the bet - was that this guy was already betting that entire countries in Europe would crash within years way back in 2009. "The Big Short" about the U.S. crisis is even better.
Si los del gobierno escucharnos quisieran
Toda esta reforma se iba a parar
Pero ellos no quieren
No les interesa
Abrir un debate a la sociedad
Si no nos escuchan es por cobardía
vergüenza me da
Hay voces que suenan de noche y de día por tu libertad
Ay pena, penita, pena, pena
Qué pena tenemos todos
Nos venden a las empresas
Pena, pena
Don Botín es el patrón
Han salvado a los grandess bancos y toda la culpa es para ti
Tu explotado trabajando y hasta aquí
Esta democracia da pena
Ya está bien ya está bien, ya está bien de tanta penita pena
See Inside Job for the American version of the above movie.
The Current Situation:
Nov. 10, 2011.
Spain is in a huge deepening black hole which it basically dug for itself pre-2008. Both of the major parties are responsible for the profligacy of the real estate bubble and its bursting that put Spain in the hole it's in, both of them (just like in the U.S.), which is why the “indignados” (the local variant of the Occupy Wall Street movement) have no idea which one to support, so they support neither.
In the last few years since the "crisis" started, there have already been many billions of euros of cutbacks. Even so, there are plenty of examples of the partiality of politicians' sorry choices of where to cut from, or not. For example, there have been plenty of cases of politicians from many parties giving themselves large raises in recent months.
In general, pundits predict the right wing PP is going to take over after next month's presidential elections by a landslide. A lot of Spaniards are fed up with the failed incumbent president's policies and hope that the change will resolve the crisis, but the "crisis" is Europe-wide as well as world-wide, and as such Spain's leaders will have to kowtow to foreign leaders and capitalists (big investors) for a long time to come (some here say that Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Sarkozy are actually now the presidents of Spain), even if a Lehman Brothers moment doesn't take place here in Europe what with Greece and other European countries being perpetually on the very edge of bankruptcy regardless of all the measures European leaders have taken thus far to stop the steepening slide into the abyss.
Meaning: it's hard to predict exactly how this is all going to wind up. Though a few truths seem to stand out from all the rest of the hoopla. Though the PP is not in control at a national level at this very moment, it is at a regional level, and at this level it has already started to cut spending in a big way in the public sphere and moved to some extent towards privatizing the public sector. The PP's candidate for president has talked of big reforms coming our way and though he's not been clear about the details of his plan (for obvious reasons due to the people it will have an impact on? and maybe because he'll have to do whatever other European leaders tell him to do?), if he can manage to get an absolute majority I think the measures will be even more drastic.
How does this affect the world of English teaching? Well, I think if you keep your ambitions and expectations super-low and keep your parachute handy (you know, to get the heck out of Dodge, if need be), you'll be OK. Apparently, there are plenty of opportunities still out there, in Madrid anyway, but you can never ever bet on Spain doing something right in the long-term because every other election will have the opposing party throwing the other party's baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
So, don't go trying to invest your inheritance on anything here such as a language school franchise, etc. This place is currently full of uncertainties and any one them could rise up an bite you on the ass at any time. This friggin' place looks set to melt down at any moment. (There's already 50% unemployment amongst young men and women, 25% amongst older folks, and they're getting set for a new round of dismissals . . . stand back when the heads start rolling again lest one of them be yours. How can this country stand another round of that?)
Also, other countries on the periphery of Europe, especially Italy and Greece, can crash and burn at any moment taking Spain down with them. They say Italy and Spain are too big to fail, which I gather means that Europe will just let them go if that happens.
And one thing's for sure, when the winners and losers are accounted for in 10 years' time, they're much more likely to be from the insiders' group (the oligarchy and their minions) than from the outsiders' group, which probably includes you. The same rich families have been in power here for the last 70 years and no upstart foreign outsiders are likely to threaten that ranking anytime soon, unless they've married into the ruling classes that is. Spain would have to be Mr. Magoo to get through this one unscathed.
Denial of Cutbacks from education from the government.
Sept. 12, 2011.
According to 20Minutos, the president of the Community of Madrid has denied that there have been any cutbacks in education. Apparently, she more or less said, that it was totally and absolutely false" because she's only set 4 hours of day of class for the teachers.
Apparently, she's also saying something like that the teachers' unions have called off the strikes, or so she believes. By the way, I don't believe they've actually been called off.
Anyway, last week on the 7th of September 20Minutos had another article in which Aguirre apologized for saying that teachers only taught 20 hours per week. That might mean that instead of correcting 170 students' notebooks, quizzes and so on per week/month (or whatever) that it'd actually end up being 200.
What I've heard one teacher say is that she wouldn't be able to correct the notebooks anymore. I guess it's not easy to correct some students' hieroglyphics. Also, many teachers are getting classes outside of their specialty (Biologists might have to teach Physics, etc. even though they haven't done it since their high school days. That means more preparation than they had counted on.)
I don't understand how these cutbacks can't be detrimental to education. Can somebody explain it to me? By the way, today I got a letter telling me more or less that due to the crisis City Hall was no longer going to pay for any of our child's books. He goes to a public school and they used to pay for them, but now I've got to cough up another 80 euros. Also, though he went to school today and the teacher was there, apparently there was a lot more recess time today due to the "strike". I don't suppose these things have anything to do with the "cutbacks". . . ?
Cutbacks in Public Education September of 2011.
The Community of Madrid has recently made some major cutbacks (affecting possibly 1,000s of interns - some teachers here have been interns for 10 years or longer, by the way) in the local system of public education (elementary and high school teachers), ostensibly in order to save money because the economy has been getting progressively worse for some time.
Accompanying the cutbacks, there has been an attack on the reputation of these teachers with comments such as they work too little, they're privileged (i.e. they get paid too much), undemanding (i.e. lazy), and uncollaborative.
The remaining teachers are likely to find their already impossibly difficult job even more difficult with more hours and more students per class. Imagine having to try to control a classroom of 35-40 children instead of 20-25. (Imagine having to send your own child to such a chaotic zoo.) I knew of teachers before who refused to take groups of kids on day-trips and excursions and schools which refused to let groups which got too large and hard-to-control near a labratory. This sort of thing will only get worse.
The local parents' association (sort of like the PTA in the States) published this open letter (in Spanish) to Esperanza Aguirre, the Thatcher-like politician who seems to be intent on little-by-little replacing the public system of education (or government-funded system) with a private one, or so they say.
The main reasons the President of the Community of Madrid (who seems to be rather right-wing) is giving for the cutbacks are economic, but the local parents' association has been complaining about these sorts of things for years:
- Fewer workers and less money for public schools.
- The closing of public schools while private schools nearby are either opened or supported economically somehow, such as with the granting of public lands.
- The elimination of grants for people with economic problems while people without such problems get more economic help.
- Public schools in the Community of Madrid are not receiving the same level of new technologies (i.e. computers in the classrooms) as other communities.
According to the letter, the Community of Madrid needs to cut 80 million euros from education, but the parents' association complains that these cuts are coming from public education and not from “subsidized” (concertado) education, where the amounts have actually risen to 90 million euros. (Some of this money is going to grants for parents who are taking their children to these semi-private subsidized schools, which in my opinion, are not at all better than public schools.)
The letter also claims that the President of the Community said that teachers wouldn’t mind doing more hours per week because 20 hours a week of classes was much less than what the other citizens were doing. Apparently, she apologized for this cynical comment, but the parents' association complains further with something like, “how can we ask our children to respect their teachers if we insult them publically?” (Basically, everyone knows that we can’t just show up to each class with whatever comes to mind, but rather we must prepare them first and then do things like correct homework and so on.)
The parents association also complains that the 1,000s of lost teachers will add up to a combined total of about 108,000 lost man-hours per week and over 2,000,000 per year. They ask something like, “do you want us to think that it’s not going to be noticeable?” Along with this sort of general problem is mentioned more specific problems such as teachers having to teach subjects they’re not trained for. This was common enough already as, for example, I know a biology teacher who was teaching physics, chemistry and another subject, all of which she was not initially prepared for.
Finally, though there’s a lot more to the letter, but I just want to mention that the parents' association asks that the Community stop firing teachers who have been educated, trained and often have extensive teaching experience in order to replace them with other teachers straight out of universities received via private companies and foundations, which according to the letter, are being paid by the Community of Madrid.
This last bit would fit in rather nicely with the news that Native Irish teachers without any knowledge of Spanish have started to teach Social Sciences classes, Natural Sciences classes and English classes. Apparently, these teachers came to Spain to teach as assistants, but to their surprise found themselves fully in charge of their classes. If so, they’ve been dropped into a bee hive. Good luck to them!
Now, this all may be bad news for the quality of public education in Madrid (or education period), but this is obviously an opportunity for young Irish and British teachers to get their foot in the door. If I recall correctly, Aguirre seems to have favoured private business over public (in the health sector and with the official school of languages) and native teachers over non-native ones in the past, so it's probably a good bet that she'll continue to do so in future.
Also, learning English still seems to be a top priority for plenty of people so private classes are still to be had easily enough, but in-company classes in smaller companies not as easily as before. Some people are claiming a boom in English classes in Madrid and one teacher I know claims last year was the best he'd ever had salary-wise here in about 15 years. It remains to be seen, however, what having 1,000s of teachers available will do to the market.
As a parent with his child in a public school, however, I'm concerned. Already, I have to pay for extracurricular sports activities because, as the letter points out, my kid's public school has no sports department to speak of. In addition, though I'm happy with my kid's current teacher, I can see the situation deteriorating. I can see, for example, that the level of the English classes in the school is pretty low and I'm pretty sure that many parents are paying for classes in academies for that very reason.
Company
Requires English Teachers
March of 2011.
Update: the "crisis" seems to be worsening little by little for the country as a whole and the English teaching sector does seem to be somewhat affected. Everybody still has plenty of work but pay seems to have frozen where it was when this all started, and maybe classes aren't as easy or fast to come by as they used to be. Company classes have to have suffered quite a bit. About 9-10 months ago, the government cut back on spending in a big way seriously hurting a lot of construction companies which had been just barely hanging on due to the crisis. I personally lost a company and its 4 weekly classes that way, which I luckily quickly made up for elsewhere.
Let me explain what I think is the big picture here:
The biggest problem regarding the smaller companies upon which I used to make a living from though is the problems with the banks which had been way overexposed to the huge housing boom gone bust a few years ago. Many of them are unable to get the short-term loans (usually 6 months) that so many smaller companies here depended on in the past. Basically, the system was that no-one ever had any money to pay anybody with and they had to get paid first by their clients before they could pay their suppliers. (Of course, their suppliers were in the same boat.) The crisis stopped all that and put a lot of smaller companies out of business.
The government not having any money is extremely worrying because Spain supposedly is finding it more and more difficult and expensive to get financing from world markets. Interestingly enough, they make a big thing of it in the news when an oil sheik invests 2 billion euros in Spain, but they may well need over 100 billion, who knows?! The "cajas", or savings and loans banks have been opaque about what they owe. This has been one of the main reasons that the financial markets have been hard on Spain in the past couple of years, the other is that foreign markets don't seem to know who's really in charge in Spain, the central government, or any of the 16 other autonomous community's governments.
Apparently, though they need to cut back on government spending in a big way because of the huge deficit problem, they seem to be unable to do so in the most logical, efficient way because of the power of the pork-barrel classes, so they tend to make cuts where it would hurt them the least politically-speaking, with the powerless. Basically speaking, they would probably be better off, for example, to reverse devolution to the autonomous communitites (17 separate governments, public health care systems, and even separate regional police forces, etc.) and centralize to save money. Also, years of listening to students go on about their relatives' presenteeism somewhere in the bureacracy lead me to think that they could probably do the same amount of work with 25-30% fewer state workers.
Add to this that there seems to be a perfect storm brewing currently because of the revolutions in the Arab world driving up oil prices. Spain is hugely overdependent on oil for energy and given the current economy, this would seem to be brewing up a nice little disaster. The government announced recently that it was cutting the speed limit back to 110 kph from 120 kph on the highways, for example, to save money for Spain. This would seem to be a desperate move to me.
Last year the government already cut back on civil servants' pay by 10% more or less and there have recently been other savings moves in the public system of education.
Finally, there's officially something like 20% unemployment (but it's probably higher due to their funky statistic crunching), which means there have to be far fewer students to go around. So far, rates are holding steady, but many private students are taking fewer hours of classes and doing a lot more shopping around before they settle on a teacher.
On the "positive side", bear in mind that there has always been an enormous underground economy (I hesitate to say "black market") so there's still plenty of cash floating around for private classes. And, for the ambitious few (our clients), English is still the key to their success abroad. On the one hand, businessmen need English if they wish to do business abroad; On the other, bright students are looking at moving abroad and working in Germany and/or elsewhere and they really, really, really need it.
By the way, online English classes are one place where I think students are looking for a bargain. As long as online rates are on a par with face-to-face classes, there's not much to worry about. But, if online classes at far lower rates ever take off, you can expect to get quickly undercut out of the market.
Summer of 2009.
Is there a crisis in Madrid? Seemingly so, but how deep it is or how deep it will get is anybody's guess.
Is there a crisis for English teachers in Madrid?:
Updated June 6
William Christison: I gotta say in this crisis year I've got the best crop of private students ever. Conscientious, better than “fairly” constant, authentically pleasant people. I think I've finally mastered getting rid of the duds early on.. How about the rest of you?
Steven: I took advantage of the downturn (I expected more unemployed students to be out there) and tightened up on my conditions regarding how much my students have to study. Now, I've got a false beginner who's studying well over 10 hours a week and progressing super-fast (He's doing two New English File units per week, reading graded readers, doing stuff from Murphy's, etc. etc. on his own.) We only do the speaking activities in 2 hours of class per week. I can barely keep up with him. It's an interesting change. What's also ironic to me is that I just found out that a company where I work at has given my students 6 months to improve to upper-intermediate level. Three of them are "false" intermediates who need lots more grammar practice at pre-intermediate level. They basically have to do the same thing as the first student I mentioned and one has already started of his own accord. It's a startling change of attitude and motivation. What acceleration!!! It makes me feel like they're in a hurry to get back in the race.
Updated May 27 May
From a MadridTeacher: "The calls are coming in considerably less than last year but not drastically so on my end. Right now I'm full up and am back to refusing principiantes and semi principiantes as well."
From another MadridTeacher: "I'm not getting as many requests, private or company, as before. I have lost a few classes. It is more difficult to keep a full timetable but I manage to do so, mostly. MadridTeacher still seems valuable."
From another MadridTeacher: "Things here are going fine - I have some students who have stopped classes due to crisis - namely ones who work at . . . (of course) and some at . . . - in general I am getting more petitions from 'particulares' more than companies. A lot of people on 'Paro' who want interview preparation. I'm getting less calls than last year, but still a few." ("paro" means unemployment.)
From another MadridTeacher: "I've been getting enquiries these last two weeks almost every day as well as a few calls. I hope it keeps up through the summer and into september. In any case I'm full up so no complaints for the present. How's things with you? I'd be interested to hear about the overall feedback you get from other teachers on this point. Keep me posted."
From another MadridTeacher: "I started a a couple new classes this week, but calls/emails are definitely down. I do hesitate a bit in saying that though because it is Spring now and there's usually a drop in interest right about now, no?"
From another MadridTeacher: "I am not getting as many requests as I used to, actually, this month I haven’t got any from private students. I don’t know if it is because the summer is near or because of the so mentioned “economic crisis”. I haven’t lost any company classes so far, I have both what I call 'pick hours' which are early morning and lunch time fully booked. They are only three companies and I have had them for years. I don’t teach in companies in the afternoon because I live in . . . and it is not worth my while to drive to the companies for one hour. In the afternoon I teach private students in my house, people who live in this area and take their English class on their way home from work. These private students are cancelling more than they used to. A new thing is that I have unemployed students in the middle of the morning they need their English to find a new job. It is good because they fill the empty hours in the morning between 10:00 and 14:00. However, these students cancel a lot too."
From another MadridTeacher: "I can say I haven´t had any serious problems so far but I find your decision of migrating the site so positive! Any improvement in our job is always most welcome and , what is so important, can make our business go further.
It´s rather dififcult for me to let you know about my availability as it changes all the time. Nevertheless, I expect to have July and August less busy so I will need new students for this time (in August between 11 and 25 as I am on holiday from 3rd to 10th and from 25th to 7th more or less).
As far as the number of requests is concerned, I have noticed an important decrease in the number of requests for company classes and also in the number of telephone calls from private students (although the number of emails remains the same).
All in all, I think the crisis has not affected our business too much so far but it is my personal view on it that may differ from others."
From another MadridTeacher: "I've just got an intensive in-company class on the outskirts of Madrid for the next two months so I'm ok for now."
From another MadridTeacher: "Last year I was fortunate to receive an enquiry from a large company, where I began to teach in September, and where I shall continue for the foreseeable future.
However, I have received no other enquiries from companies.
- No, I have not lost any classes."
From Steven: "I'm afraid your not getting calls from companies is probably due to all too many of them either cutting back or not even starting up on account of the economy. I'll be advertising in Google Adwords over the next few months to the tune of 300 a month. Hopefully, that will do something. I have a couple of unemployed students too, by the way."
Also, by the way, the usual thing for me at this time of year is to get lots more phone calls than now. In any case, so it won't sound more negative than it actually is, I've also picked up some more classes in one of my companies and a new contract in a university for next year which I'm really happy about. (Aug. 28 - I got a call from a company this morning for in-company classes.)
Updated May 26 May
The business has slowed down noticeably here though there's obviously still work to be had. I think the current situation basically boils down to us English teachers for the time being having to work harder for less under far less economically stable circumstances. Partly, this is because I think attitudes are changing all around for the worse on account of the economy. For example, some clients are using the heightened competitition to their advantage, whether for resetting class schedules or negotiating lower rates, or simply just cancelling classes more often whenever they feel a need to. There's also definitely been a slow down in requests for teachers from both companies and private students. Also, some smaller companies are taking a lot longer to pay and a few have trouble even making payments at all in the first place. In some cases, small amounts like 150 to 300 euros seems to be causing major problems for them, which is really worrying. I've even had a couple of clients skip out on me over the past six months. For the most part, I have grown a mature list of clients over the years who are now tending to stick with me, but I think growing such a list would be harder for newer, younger, less-experienced freelancers.
Hopefully, things will improve for the sector for the next school year. I'm just happy I recently managed to land a decent-paying part-time job at a university which looks like it'll be growing into full-time employment over the next few years. My advice to you is to try to be more conservative and stay on the safe side if at all possible. i.e. Flee to safety! In other words, make sure to analyze (economically speaking) whoever you're thinking you'd like to work for and save whenever you can for a rainy day. Of course, I tend to be an ant rather than a grasshopper. There are plenty of the latter in the business here and they seem to do just fine. What type are you?
Updated March 3: hearsay, etc:
I'm still hearing little bits of bad news here and there, but nothing major-league. i.e. A teacher tells me a large bank he works at has cancelled all the English training though he also tells me he's had no trouble finding replacement work. Another tells me another large bank did away with all the English teacher providers except for one because all except the classes for the most important people were cancelled. Then too, a freelance teacher I know has told me that a company client of his wants to delay payment for his classes for several months and it's just 350 euros! That's a low blow, but not a major disaster. Also, I personally have now had a couple of clients default on their payments for very low amounts and about 50% of them are taking noticeably longer to make payments - one got behind by 3 months recently.
Regarding the psychological atmosphere, in general, most of my company clients are either negative or very negative about the future for the next several years though a couple of them have actually benefitted from the recession - because their whole sector benefits in one case and because of competitors going under in another couple of cases. Many of the "negative" ones have had to lay people off by the way.
Updated January 24: Further speculations and ruminations about the "crisis"
It's occurred to me that the "crisis" has to be making some HR people and clients re-assess their English class providers and maybe check around for cheaper rates. Some of them have to be thinking they can take advantage of the downturn to find a better deal. That's "deflation". I think we're all shopping around for something cheaper because of the "crisis" or even expecting prices of something to go down at some point soon.
Updated January 24: Reports about the economy on the web.
Although the banks in Spain are strong, there has been a "financial crisis" plus a mega-crash in Real Estate sector. Apparently, the automotive sector has been hit especially hard as well, but generally speaking all sectors are falling.
ElPais.com: Bruselas augura para España una tasa de paro del 19% en 2010 - Brussels predicts an unemployment rate of 19% for Spain in 2010. The Spanish government predicts 15,9% in 2009 and 15,7% in 2010. In my opinion, the Spanish government tends to err in its own favor in its predictions. Brussels expects the "crisis" to last a bit longer in Spain due to the constructions sector's problems.
I'm hearing rumors (unconfirmed) of serious 20-40% cutbacks at various companies starting in January of 2009. I haven't lost any other classes myself.
Updated November 30: Some good and bad news.
The bad news: I've got a friend with an academy who tells me she's lost 40% of her classes in companies and has had to temporarily lay off 4 teachers completely and one more has lost just part of his classes. She says her clients are in fact pressuring her to lower her rates. The good news: her school's not in Madrid.
Updated November 27: Some further observations and ruminations on the crisis.
Regarding the "crisis:" I can’t really be sure where things stand at the moment here or where they’re going to end up. In the past 4 or 5 months I’ve analyzed the situation every which way (I subscribe to the Economist, TIME, etc.) and I don’t know any more than I did before. In other words, I'm just speculating in the text below:
I just know I’ve got clients with problems, which means I may end up having problems. All of them are pretty negative about the future. One of my students has an import company and he’s lost so many sales that he’s stopped importing. Another big multinational client has lost millions and projects a 20% loss over the next year. I know they've already laid off lots of "temporary" folks (temporary like me) and judging from the looks on their faces, they'll probably have to let more go. I’ve already lost one group with this last client and I think I’m going to lose another one in December or January (I haven’t had the student in the class since July because of the crisis, but they’re still paying). All of my clients have some sort of a problem even if it’s just not being able to get a 200,000-euro loan from a bank to tide them over till their own clients pay them.
Payments between companies can take as long as 180 days, but the government maybe wants their taxes in July and won’t give companies their tax-returns for up to 6 months themselves. The banks claim they're perfectly healthy but, in fact, used to give those very same 200,000-euro "tiding-over" loans very easily up till just a few months ago. And, by the way, many academies and agencies with big in-company multiple-teacher contracts will have to go through the same sort of financing "hell." Some of them will need loans to pay off their teachers while they wait/hope to get paid, but they won't necessarily be able to get the credit. It may put some of them between a rock and a hard place, especially the ones with clients in certain especially hard-hit industries such as Real Estate and Automotive (who may take forever to pay - a couple of my own clients seem to be taking longer than usual to pay, by the way).
Otherwise, I've experienced a few other "realities" of the downturn.
For example, one little company I know (I can't say exactly who it is of course for legal reasons) has disappeared from the face of the Earth owing me (and who knows how many employees like you).
My feeling is that the situation is getting worse, not better. Signs abound such as the fact that unemployment a couple of months ago was up by 200,000, in one month in a country of 40,000,000. Unemployment is projected by some to go up to 17% or worse. Is this just short-term panic? I don't know.
There are other situations that add to the complexity of getting an understanding of the breadth and depth of the situation such as the probability that some multinational companies are taking advantage of the situation to broadly restructure their companies to lower expenses by perhaps eliminating a large part of middle-management (I know of one in fact).
Even some of the strong companies (and banks) are doing everything they can to hang on to every bit of cash that they can if for no other reason than to be able to feed on the corpses of other bankrupt companies themselves (to paraphrase "The Economist" more or less). BSCH, for example, is buying up foreign banks like they're at a flea market.
Basically, I think these crises bring out the best and worst in people. In other words, we all hope that it'll bring out the best in people, but we all know that it's also bringing out the scoundrels, vultures and predators in people. There are "opportunities" all around for a company with lots of cash. Unscrupulous companies with large contracts may also exploit their English-teacher-suppliers' current "weakness" to pressure them to force their rates down. (So, you may be asked to lower your rates corresponding.)
How or where do English teachers stand in all this mess? "On pretty shaky ground" and "on our own." For example, "Autonomos" (a legal term for self-employed workers) have no rights in Spain to much of anything. The bureacracy here is pretty cumbersome and opaque, and the judicial system is currently pretty strained with loads of additional problems including strikes amongst the judges and an out-of-date computer system, and even if you did have a problem with a company that you'd like help with from the courts, you'd not likely get it taken care of very easily or cheaply.
Again, let me say that I'm just speculating again. Things could just be perfectly rosy out there. I've still got 30 hours of in-company classes myself after all. Maybe I just need a glass of Rioja, a Prozac and a week-long vacation in the Canary Islands.
Nov. 28 update - Thomas' response: Hey Steve . . .
Don't mix prozac and red wine, as you'll end up with hang out and hangover at the same time. Anyway, whatever, not to worry. There are obviously a lot of people going to hell in a handcart at the moment and I hope we are not among them. A lot of this is just panic by people who have loads of money but are afraid to spend it. Obviously, if you do have money it is an opportunity to get some bargains. This thing could end just as fast as it started. There is more money out there than ever and eventually it has to flow again.
Nov. 28 update - Bob's response: The fact that you have read up so much on the crisis and still can't make heads or tails of it is heartening. I could never stomach readings on economy and if neither the experts on BBC or NPR nor my own banking students are able to really explain it all either, well...
So far, I'm doing okay with enough under-the-table privates as well as withholding ones. The only difference is that this year I'm working more hours (over 40, plus any spot jobs I can handle) and am even taking near beginners that I wouldn't have previously touched. The latter usually drop off after a month but, as long as they do not take up my peak hour classes, I don't mind. A good nest egg is advisable.
Another change, apart from the increased hours, is that I'm charging at least 4 classes in advance to solidify the commitment, no more daily payments. Other than that my routine, along with my price for the last two years, remains pretty much the same. The e-mails are coming now at about 2 or 3 a day and the landline phone rings quite frequently, but I no longer answer the latter.
I'll keep you posted on any changes, right now I'm just touching wood.
Updated November 1: A letter to English teachers in Madrid from Steven Starry.
I don't know if the crisis has hit our sector, that's why I'm asking. If you have any news or anecdotes about this that you can share with me that I can mention on the site, let me know at madridteacher@gmail.com.
In case you haven't heard, the world's stock markets have been melting down out there for the past few weeks and don't appear to have bottomed out yet. My own clients have all been affected in some way by this but also seem to be taking it in stride so far. How about yours? Have any of you lost any clients because of this? I haven't yet myself, but I'm a little anxious. How about you? A few of my own clients have clearly been directly affected by the crisis, but I think they are a little confused and are still trying to figure out where to go from here.
Really, given the massive and uprecedented breadth of this crisis, I'm really at a loss. Locally, for example, according to El Pais politicians in Madrid have suddenly cut the budget to Universities by 30% (108 million euros) and apparently the City of Madrid has frozen all spending on any new public-works projects. There are also plenty of other ominous stories in the local and international news to worry about such as the bankruptcy of a country, Iceland.
The only re-action and recommendation I can come up with at this point is to take on a lot more work than is healthy, physically speaking - all that you can drum up and put up with, that is. Also, it may be a bit too late now, but try not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Regarding MadridTeacher.com, October was the site's most successful month ever with 145,000 visits (September had 130,000 visits), and (knock on wood) I recently started a new advertising project for our English teacher advertisers in Google Adwords with around 300 euros a month or 10 euros a day. (This last rate is as of Dec. 2) If my teacher-advertisers have any availability at all to speak of, now's the time to try to get those time-slots filled.
Al Pacino's Inspirational Speech
A little something to boost your spirits and to remind you about teamwork.
General responses to the letter above
I received a number of responses to my email in early October which were mostly positive. Apparently, no-one had lost classes directly from the crisis so far (as far as we know), though there were some worried comments from teachers with companies in the construction sector where the students seem to have had more shocking stories to tell (including me). Besides construction, I'd be leery of anything in "vehicles" at the moment, which is another sector which has been hit hard.
Also, there was one other mention from a teacher who lost all their company classes in a past recession.
Most respondents said they were receiving more calls than before then, though a couple who were charging around 30 euros per hour had lowered their rates. The feeling here seemed to be that their new clients felt more motivated to learn English in order to stay competitive in the job market just in case.
Oct. 14 update: Peter's point below is extremely relevant as well. What I decided to do personally-speaking (really!) is to discuss the issue a little indirectly with my clients. (I.e. Jokingly: "So, is your company going to crash?" or "Should I be looking around for new clients in this time slot?" or "Did you realize that there may soon be a lot of teachers out of work out there and you may want to start shopping around for somebody cheaper?") I'd like to find out if any of them are thinking of cancelling their classes next year due to the crisis so I can have more time to drum up some replacement work.
Peter's Response
So far no crisis with me at any rate.
If it is going to come, it’s more likely to be post rather than pre Christmas. Companies will be re-examining their 2009 budgets now if they have not already done so.
Nov. 1 update from Peter: "Generally speaking, the number of enquiries I have been getting via MadridTeacher in the last fortnight has dropped significantly. Is this trend general?"
Philip's Response
In reference to the crisis I have not had any problems. When there was a problem in 2001/2 I lost a lot of hours as I was working in an academy that had Telefonica as a major client, and I was based in Terra. In one go I lost 12 hrs a week. I was able to get hours from different academies in two weeks.
Since I started working as autonomo I have spread my hours among different companies, and take no more than 6 hours a week. I would also advise this to anyone, especially now. I have been offered 30 hours in a block, but the company wants super reductions, and if you plan your timetable right, you can do little travelling and less hours and still be earning the same.
Another piece of advice would be to always get paid for private classes weekly, or even daily if it is a large amount.
I have not noticed a decrease in the number of offers, from academies, companies or private people.
There could be several reasons for this, Spanish companies are having problems in Spain and are looking to expand abroad (as is the case of several clients), companies are moving into Spain, setting up or buying up Spanish companies (the case of several clients).
Another interesting piece of news that I saw recently in one of the free newspapers was that people are reducing their spending on gym (why pay when running in the park is free?) but spending on language classes is increasing. Obviously, people are worried about their jobs, and are trying to make themselves look more attractive to current/possible employers.
Tim's Response:
Thanks for the interesting email. The 'crisis' is something that I am thinking about too but I have taken on a lot of new contracts and at the moment have a full schedule (i.e no availability...FYI). I am receiving a lot of enquiries, mostly private but with about 30% of them being from businesses and I have had some cancellations but have had no problem in filling the 'huecos' up to now.
A lot of my clients are relaying horror stories from their own clients. I have one student who was telling me that 300 of his company's clients (mostly involved in construction) have closed (His client base is about 5000). The 300 contained small, medium and large companies. We are talking about 1000's out of work.
On the other hand, I have started with a medium-sized information technology company that has decided the only way to grow and compete in the market is to look outside Spanish borders. As such they are required to operate in English. They are making the investment in their people so that they may be more competitive. I am lucky as the GM is the driving force behind the push to improve English within the organisation and is one of my fastest improving students.
It will be interesting (and dare I say a little frightening) to see how companies continue to invest if banks continue to withhold funds and the lack of confidence endures.
Podcasts made from Creative Commons Wikipedia articles:
Book: 
Si los del gobierno escucharnos quisieran
Economy of Spain
