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'I'll give you €5,000 if you will give my son a job', says desperate father

Jessica Jones
Jessica Jones - [email protected]
'I'll give you €5,000 if you will give my son a job', says desperate father
The man has already received several calls about the advert. Photo: neetalparekh/Flickr

Despite its strengthening economy, Spain retains one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU and one pensioner has taken drastic measures to get his son a job.

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The man, who preferred to remain anonymous, posted the 25-word advert in regional newspaper El Heraldo de Aragón at the end of August offering €5,000 ($5,620) to any company that would employ his son.

"Pensioner offering €5,000 to company that employs his unemployed son," the advert said.


The advert appeared in newspaper, El Heraldo de Aragón.

The man went on to describe his son’s attributes: "qualified, responsible and hard-working. Good professional record". 

"My son is desperate," the man told El Heraldo de Aragón, "as a father I cannot watch him in pain and stand by and do nothing," he added.

"Perhaps publishing this kind of advert seems improper but over time I have lost any shame," he said.

The man, originally from Huesca in northeastern Spain, is a lawyer and has spent half his life working in public administration. While he now lives in Madrid, his son, who is 39-years-old and has a young child, remains in Huesca, where he has been struggling to find work for several months.  

The advert appeared in the Heraldo de Aragón on Friday 28th August and while he did not originally tell his son, the man soon admitted what he had done and confessed to the paper that he son was "extremely angry" with him.

His son has worked in several companies over the years in administrative and IT positions, but like many Spaniards has struggled to find work during the economic crisis. His father is helping him and his family out for now but as he pointed out, he "won’t be here forever". 

The story is just one example of the situation in which many Spaniards have found themselves since the beginning of the crisis, which saw the country’s unemployment levels soar.

The latest figures released by Spain’s employment ministry show the current unemployment level is at  22.4 percent, the second highest in the European Union after Greece.

The man is keen to point out that he is not offering the €5,000 as some kind of bribe but more as an "economic partnership" to help his son "form his own business in the future or join an existing one". 

 He says he received around 20 calls from interested companies within a week of placing the ad.

"What surprised me was that the majority did not even mention the money, which is obviously the most striking part of the advert," he said. 

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