Spanish town struggles with 75 pc unemployment

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LA LANTEJUELA, (Spain), March 21 (AFP): On the outskirts of this town of white-washed houses, dozens of warehouses where building materials were once produced have been idle since an economic boom came to an abrupt end last year.
During the height of the country's credit-fueled property boom the dozens of small and medium sized building firms which sprang up in La Lantejuela employed up to 80 per cent of the southeastern town's workers as local residents abandoned farm work for more lucrative jobs in construction.
But those jobs began to quickly disappear last year as the global credit crunch exacerbated a slowdown that was already underway in Spain's real estate sector.
Today nearly 75 per cent of the town's economically active population is jobless, one of the highest unemployment rates in Spain, which in turn is the nation with the highest jobless rate in the 27-nation European Union.
Between the end of 2007 and the end of last year the number of unemployed in La Lantejuela jumped by 132 per cent, according to mayor Juan Vega.
"This is not viable," he said, adding he felt "powerless" before the dozens of struggling local residents who file through his office every day to ask for help.
"They have gone into debt to build a house, buy a car. Today they cannot pay back the loans and the companies are threatening to cut off their water and electricity," said Vega, who belongs to the United Left coalition.
Just a decade ago most workers in the town of some 3,800 people nestled in the Andalucian countryside between Seville and Cordoba had jobs as farm labourers.
"But once the construction sector had its boom, everyone raced towards this more lucrative sector," said Vega.
The town's decline is a microcosm of the situation throughout Spain, where the bubble burst on the property market last year and battered the nation's economy. Spain's unemployment rate hit 14.8 per cent in January after the impact of the collapse in the building sector spread to other areas, and many economists predict it will continue to rise to hit 20 per cent next year.
Finance-economy-Spain-2 Last, SPAIN To draw attention to the plight of La Lantejuela, the mayor of the town locked himself in his office for 24 hours in February-and got national media coverage.
"What saves us is family solidarity. Many couples with children have already returned to live with their parents or they go eat at their parents' house several times a week," said Vega.
With no job since August, mortgage payments to make and a teenage daughter to raise, Jose Andujar Martin said he had no choice but to return to the farm work that he left four years ago for higher-paying work in construction.
"Even if I have no desire to do it, I will certainly go back to picking strawberries, as I did for 10 years," Martin, 48, said as he sat at the counter at one of the town's bars.
Faced with a sharp decline in demand, Antonio Moreno is struggling to keep his aluminium siding plant, which employed 20 people as recently as last year, alive.
"In a few months orders dropped, clients stopped paying, I had to let my employees go and I only work now with my two children," the 59-year-old said.