Self-study activity:
Watch the video clip by clicking on the BBC link above or on the picture below and answer the questions about it.
1 What do most of the restaurant workers get in return for their work?
2 How long has Jose been unemployed?
3 How many paid staff members work at the restaurant?
4 How much do customers pay for a meal?
5 What does '60,000€' refer to?
6 What is the unemployment rate in Spain, according to the video?
You can check your answers by reading the transcript below.
Lunch time in Tarrasa, a Catalan town, and this is a restaurant with a difference. Nearly everyone working here is unemployed. They don’t get paid for the work they do here, but in return they eat for free.
28-year-old Lanuta has been out of work for 18 months. 23-year-old Jose for two and a half years, and then there’s Jaume.
It’s a project, to help us…
How long have you been looking for a stable job?
Six years.
Estafania is also one of the 6.2 million unemployed people in Spain, and 58-year-old Dolores has been looking for work for three years.
It’s made me feel useful working here, she tells us. Before I felt isolated at home and I got depressed, she says.
Including the two cooks, the restaurant has four paid members of staff. A three-course meal plus wine and water costs just 6.50€. Some of the customers like Alfonso and his wife pay, others like Andres are also unemployed. He sometimes works here for free, so he can eat here for free too.
Now despite the fact that some of the customers here work to cover the cost of their food, the overall cost of running this restaurant in this its first year is expected to be 60,000€ more than the income generated by paying customers, so it does raise the question of how even a novel social project like this one can be sustainable in the longer term.
The managers are asking local companies for sponsorship, and might even increase the price for paying customers. The project, they say, gives people back their self-esteem.
They are much more happy. They are even getting achieving new friends, so they are well recuperating them for the common society, for Spain, because we are giving them some additional tools to cope with this huge crisis.
It’s a crisis which is now into its sixth year. Projects like this can only help cut the massive rate of unemployment in Spain which stands at a record 27%.
Tom Burridge, BBC News in the town of Tarrasa, in Cataluña.
