Young adults’ financial capacity is closely connected with their position in the labour market, their main source of income. Almost one in every four adults aged between 18 and 29 live in households that find it difficult to get by to the end of the month. This indicator is higher than that of the general population, demonstrating that there is a higher concentration of young adults in households suffering from financial pressure. The percentage of young adults who find it difficult to make it to the next payday began to rise at the start of the economic crisis, rising to 42.2% in 2014. In recent years, there has been a downward trend in this, with an improvement of ten percentage points in 2017 over the previous year. Young adults’ low pay and the rate of youth unemployment in part explain their inability to meet their basic needs, though the problem is attenuated by other household members in a better situation.
The rate of consistent poverty among young adults was lower than that recorded for the whole of the population in 2009. The economic crisis reversed this pattern, however: in 2014, 13.7% of young people were living in households at risk of financial poverty and material deprivation, whereas consistent poverty affected 11.6% of the total population. In part, this result is the outcome of young adults leaving the parental home at a later date, as well as the rise in the size of poorer households by accepting other members in financial difficulties (Herrero, Soler and Villar, 2013). In more recent times, consistent poverty has fallen slightly, affecting more than one in ten young adults in 2018.
Employment is, unquestionably, the aspect that presents most challenges in terms of young adults’ welfare. The lack of professional opportunities at the start of their working life may hold back the economic and social progress of this age group. In Spain, the high youth unemployment rate is very worrying: even though it was already at high levels prior to the recession (14.3% in 2008), it rose to as much as 41% in 2013. The economic recovery has reversed this trend, although in 2018 almost one in four young adults aged between 20 and 29 who could potentially be in work was unemployed. The Spanish labour market is noted for its structural segmentation between workers aged over 30, who are on permanent contracts, and young adults, among whom there is a high rate of temporary contracts (García-Pérez and Muñoz-Bullón, 2011). The crisis not only raised the youth unemployment rate but also increased the instability of their jobs. The percentage of young adults living in households where all the workers were on temporary contracts fell during the recession, but this was because people on this type of contract were driven into unemployment. However, even though the recovery has brought about an improvement in unemployment, the incorporation of young adults into the labour market has come about fundamentally through temporary employment. In 2018, 54.8% of employees aged between 20 and 29 were on temporary contracts, a percentage that drops to 26.8% for the total population. However, the fact that other members of the household are in a better employment position attenuates the differences within the family as regards temporary jobs.
Another indication of the job insecurity faced by Spanish youth is the low pay they receive. The percentage of young adults paid less than 2/3 of the average pay rose from 17.6% in 2006 to 22.4% in 2014, reflecting the fact that the labour market for individuals aged between 20 and 29 offers poor quality jobs and a larger proportion thereof than found among the total population. The incidence of low pay for the total population does not depend on the phase of the economic cycle, but for young adults the economic cycle is key. It is for this reason that the attention is drawn to the sustained rise over the last ten years in the number of low-paid workers among those aged 20 to 29. In-work poverty among this age group was lower than that among the general population prior to 2012, but between then and now, the percentage of young adults in work living in households below the poverty threshold has continued to rise, reaching 22.2%. This result demonstrates how young adults are concentrated in households with few working hours and in poor quality jobs that make it impossible for them to escape poverty.