A job to die for

How we all love those cool modern gadgets with the half-eaten apple pictured on the back. Apple appliances have become a type of identification mark that certifies our belonging to a trendier and more techno world. It should not be forgotten, however, that the other side of the shiny coin of success that has turned Apple into the world’s largest stock-listed company hides a darker story: the factories of semi-enlsaved workers of the Foxconn company in China. The firm’s main client is Apple, but Foxconn also works for Microsoft, HP and Sony, among others.
Foxconn employs around a million people, in a working environment that bears little resemblance to Silicon Valley. Foxconn’s employees, mostly adolescents, live stacked on top of one another in dormitories of 100 beds, and their typical day can easily be summed up as follows: they get up, they eat a bowl of noodles with rice, they work for 15 hours straight, they return to their dormitories, they do carry out their ablutions and wash their clothes and then go to bed, only for the whole thing to start again the next day at 7am. For this they earn around 30 euros a month.
At the same time, Foxconn is an impregnable fortress, and the workers’ mobiles and cameras are confiscated when they first enter the factory. The featured photograph was taken with permission of the company, which does not make it difficult to imagine that the scene portrayed was set up beforehand. However, the serious expressions on the faces of the young people and – above all – the two supervisors walking the aisles, suggest quite a different story about the factory.
Not long ago, more than 150 of the company’s employees climbed up to a rooftop at the Wuhan plant with the intention of throwing themselves off. Individual cases of suicide have happened in their dozens in the past couple of years. Between 50 and 100 years ago, workers were exploited like this here, but it was not a pretty sight. Now we can exploit Chinese workers who, because of their distance from us, need not trouble our consciences.


Published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2012

Crystal clear

The Spanish general election results showed a huge success for the Spanish nationalist Partido Popular (PP). The conservative party headed by Mariano Rajoy is now in control of both the Congress and the Senate in Madrid, and needs no alliances to govern the country or pass new laws.
However, happiness is not complete for the PP. They may have won in every corner of Spain, except for Catalonia and the Basque Country, not surprisingly the two regions whose population would vote 'yes' in a referendum to secede from Spain, according to the latests polls.
The media reflected the results of the elections with the traditional headlines explaining who won and who lost, but no one did it in such a creative way as El Punt-Avui newspaper. The cover page for November 21, with the headline "Catalonia is not Spain", in English, was commented on radio stations and TV networks around the country and became an instant hit in the social media, with thousands of web surfers sharing it through Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Well done!


Published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2011

The satellites that can cause divorce

If you want an example of globalisation in the modern world, how about this? A Russian rocket launched from French soil in South America that is carrying a European satellite that can even cause you to divorce your husband or wife.
The Russian-made Soyuz rocket is carrying the first of two satellites for the European GPS Galileo system, which has been made to challenge the supremacy of the American GPS satellite network. We would never have imagined, even 25 years ago, that Russia and Western Europe would cooperate to do something like this. Welcome to the new globalised world. And in such a world, owning a GPS device has become a must.
Some years ago, when technological collaboration between both sides of the Iron Curtain (if you remember the Iron Curtain) was simply unthinkable, as GPS was secret, high-tech equipment reserved exclusively for armed forces and intelligence services. Nowadays, GPS has become a daily – and even mundane – part of our lives.
It is hardly surprising that the luxury of a disembodied voice in our car, telling us where to turn and where to stop, has become such a hit with drivers. GPS, apart from making our trips more comfortable, also saves us from those acrimonious discussions that used to arise with our co-pilots, hunched over paper maps, telling us to turn left after we have already gone sailing past the turn-off.
However, the dark side of GPS technology was also on display recently, when Apple introduced a new application for its new iPhone 4S, called 'Find My Friends'. This app allows iPhone users to see where the people in their contacts list are via the GPS chips in their phones.
Only a couple of days later, a man from New York posted on a popular social network site the following message: ''Divorcing wife. Thanks iPhone 4S and Find My Friends''.
Europe will be launching a whole bunch of satellites to build the Galileo GPS network; let’s hope it doesn’t make things even worse.
You have been warned!


Published in Catalonia Today magazine, november 2011

The tiny language that threatens an empire

Val d’Aran is a very small area in the Pyrenees that has been linked to Catalonia since 1175 when the Catalan King Alfons signed the pact of Emparança with the inhabitants of the valley. In 1313 the king agreed to concede to Aran a bill of rights called Queimònia. This ancient link with Catalonia does not make the people of Aran Catalans. In fact, the Aran valley is the only county in Catalonia not facing the Mediterranean sea, but rather the Atlantic. Aran is on the other side of the Pyrenees. The people of Aran are proud of their ancient heritage, their own culture and their language, Aranese, a variety of the Occitan tongue spoken in a large area of southern France and northern Italy.
They may be proud of their language but the Spanish government doesn’t like anyone to interfere with the tongue of the Empire: Spanish. A few month ago, the Catalan parliament passed a bill recognising the Aranese language as the language of the valley, giving it protection and preferential status in relationships between citizens and the administration and schools of the valley. The Spanish government immediately asked the Constitutional Court to suspend the Catalan law, arguing that the only preferential language within Spain is — and must be — Spanish.
It doesn’t matter that we are talking about a tiny language spoken by less than 5,000 people. It’s hard to imagine how the Aranese language can be a threat to another language spoken by 400 million people around the globe. The lack of tolerance towards diversity is part of the DNA of the Spanish state. One nation, one culture, one language. This unitarianism was born with the Bourbon state that conquered and assimilated all the kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula — with the exception of Portugal, which fought back and won — and the rulers of Spain that followed, from Franco to the elected governments of today, weren’t and aren’t keen to change this. The result of this intolerance could be the breakdown of the country in the near future.

Published in Catalonia Today magazine. October 2011.

Ramadan

This photograph could have been taken in any Muslim country around the world, or even in places with strong Muslim communities, such as Britain or France. Yet, as you can see above, this photo was taken in Barcelona, and is an image that is here to stay. Muslims are part of Catalonia again, centuries after they were expelled along with the Jews, in an attempt to 'purify' the Kingdom of Spain of its non-Christian population.
Catalonia has been a land of integration since the Phoenicians arrived in Empúries and came across the Iberians already living here, followed by the Greeks, and then the Romans, the Franks, the Goths, and then the Occitans, the Spanish, and now the Africans, the Latin-Americans or the Asians. Immigration is part of the of the Catalan DNA. However, we can’t deny that tensions and conflicts always appear when any country in the world has to deal with newcomers that produces an increase of 20 per cent of the population in less than a decade. Fear of difference is a natural reaction in human beings. That means that an extra effort is needed when our neighbourhood changes with the arrival of people who dress differently, speak differently, who eat differently, and who even pray to a different Lord.
Local authorities around Catalonia are facing the demand of the Muslim community for permission to build mosques and prayer centres. In almost every case, politicians do not want to pay the electoral cost of allowing the construction of a mosque, while tiny xenophobic and racist parties try to make the most of the tension, blaming immigrants for any robbery, any increase in unemployment or, it sometimes seems, a change in the weather.
These people are residents of Catalonia, they are Catalans now, and they have the right to their own temple, as does any other confession in the country. If a local authority denies them this fundamental right, they should also close churches and other temples. There is a saying in Catalonia that fits perfectly in this situation: O tots moros, o tots cristiansNo historical or cultural reasons could be argued to sustain the idea that one religion has more rights than another in a free and democratic country.

Let’s go clubbing!

Companies usually employ marketing teams to come up with strategies for building bonds with their customers. These strategies are almost always top-down. However, sometimes something special happens and the bonds between provider and customer develop spontaneously, bottom-up, helping to create a community of shared interests around the service or product in question.
This is what is happening now at Catalonia Today, as a process that began some months ago comes to fruition. The thousands of interactions through our web site, our podcasts, our Facebook page or our Twitter account suggested that something special was going on; a community of people linked by the English language was growing around our magazine.
The result of this interaction was that the readers and subscribers began to put forward new ideas for enriching this community that was developing. One example was the initiative to convince the managers of the Ocine cinemas to schedule films in original version in differents places around Catalonia. This idea came from the community and we at the magazine supported it and helped make it happen. Another example was when a group of readers and subscribers from the Escola Oficial d’Idiomes, who had been meeting in reading groups for a while, suggested that we spread their idea and help create more reading groups around Catalonia.
Ideas like these are what planted the seeds for the ECClub, the first English Culture Club in Catalonia, which was officially launched last month in Barcelona by its Honorary President, the English writer, Tom Sharpe. The presentation was in the huge Acabus bookstore on carrer Còrsega. We are delighted to have Abacus on board, the largest cooperative in Catalonia, with more than 750.000 members.
ECClub is now up and running and we hope it snowballs to offer ever more events and resources in English to its membership, all based around the ECClub Reading Groups. We want all our readers and subscribers to take advantage of the club, so don’t hesitate to visit http://www.cataloniatoday.cat/ or www.abacus.coop/catalonia-today and learn how you can be a part of this growing family.

Listen and learn

He is a record holder already. He won several titles as a player, and now he is demolishing statistics as a coach. So far, Josep Guardiola has won all three Spanish league titles that he has competed for as a trainer. When Barça bet on this rookie coach to replace the successful Frank Rikjaard to lead the team, only a few believed he could do it. He had never managed a team before, but from the very beginning, Guardiola showed that his leadership as a captain on the field was transferable as a coach. He is a great motivator, no matter if his men are little more than boys taking their first steps in professional football or international stars with massive egos. Guardiola has shown that he knows how to handle a group of top-level football players.
However, this season, after winning the Club World Cup, the Champions League and two La Liga titles in a row, everyone expected less from his group of Barça warriors. However, something happened that helped Guardiola to motivate his team to even greater heights, in the process making him the very first coach to win three La Liga titles in his first three seasons. This 'something' has a name: José Mourinho. Shaming the world of football and even some Real Madrid fans, the Portuguese legend began playing a dirty campaign with the aim of winning via the media what he has largely been incapable of winning on the field.
Guardiola stood strong against every attack, every accusation, every blow below the belt. When needed to motivate his men, he answered with strong words through the press, and like a practitioner of judo, used his aggressor’s strength against himself.
As a result, Barça found the motivation needed to keep the team on high alert, an attitude that helped them to win another La Liga title and an appearance in another European Cup final at Wembley.
The image that accompanies this column was taken two days after winning La Liga. It is amazing how Guardiola manages to keep his men fully concentrated, as they listen to him in silence. Look at the faces; there is only one leader in this group: Josep Guardiola.