Robert González explains that when he received his first paycheck in Barcelona after working for eight years in Mexico, he thought they had made a mistake. His salary as a high school teacher in 2022 had not increased by a single euro, it was exactly the same as before he left, in 2014. And not only that. His fees as an associate professor at the university had even dropped. "I knew that returning to Catalonia would mean I would lose purchasing power, but I didn't expect it to be so much," he confesses. "I earned more in Mexico as a full professor at the university than here with three jobs."

Pandora's box was opened by an internal email sent to their bosses by second-year junior auditors working at the Barcelona headquarters of the consulting firm EY, which spread like wildfire throughout the company, which in Spain has a staff of nearly 5,000 workers. The email, made public by the newspaper El País, denounced working weeks of these employees of 84 hours (the equivalent of 12 hours a day from Monday to Sunday or 16 hours from Monday to Friday), and all for salaries of 24,000 euros a year (about 1,300 euros for 14 payments). The letter includes complaints like this: "We have worked until late hours continuously from Monday to Sunday to get ahead a job that at no time we have been valued as it deserves". Or this one: "We have decided that it is time to intervene and raise our voices against working conditions that we consider far from the minimum acceptable".

When an organisation looks back on 2020, whatever kind of organisation it may be, it always brings up one particular point: the furlough scheme (ERTE) avoided a greater evil. On Monday, trade union UGT gave some supporting data: 1.2 million Catalans have been in this situation at some point between March 2020 and January this year. To reach this conclusion, which means that 38% of the working population of Catalonia have experienced furlough, the union has looked at the data of first-time recipients.