• Pope Francis pulls no punches on Twitter

    Franco Origlia / Getty Images

    Pope Francis waves to faithful as he arrives in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City on Wednesday. Marking the feast of St Joseph the Worker and World Labor Day, the pontiff launched an urgent appeal to Christians and men and women of goodwill worldwide to take decisive steps to end slave labor.

    By Elizabeth Chuck and John W. Schoen, NBC News

    Pope Francis took aim at corporations Thursday with a tweet heard round the world:

    While that’s not a shocking viewpoint from a former Latin American Jesuit known for his austere lifestyle, the bluntness of the message and the social-media pulpit he used to deliver it gained plenty of attention.

    Asked about the tweet Thursday at a news conference, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, paused then replied cautiously: "We are...frustrated, yes certainly.”

    The Twitter message came a day after Pope Francis ripped into the "slave labor" conditions at a Bangladesh factory whose collapse last week killed hundreds.  

    The tweet is only the 30th penned by Francis since he became leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, and was the first time he used a Twitter account followed by millions to convey so sharp a point. (Two days earlier, he tweeted benignly, "How marvelous it would be if, at the end of the day, each of us could say: today I have performed an act of charity towards others.)

    But Thursday’s message is consistent with the one the Church has espoused for centuries, theologians say.

    "Benedict said much the same thing in his final encyclical," said Thomas Groome, a Boston College professor of theology and religious education who has written numerous books on faith. "It's consistent teaching of the Catholic Church: The profit motive alone cannot be unbridled, cannot be uncontrolled, cannot be unchecked. It has to contribute to the common good."

    Not all the faithful on Twitter were quick to see it that way. Among the responses:

    "And what was the revenue generated by the Vatican last year?" 

    "You big lefty."

    "Terrific... you're another empty headed socialist... hell of a job, College of Cardinals."

    And John MacDonald, managing director at the JMAGroup accounting firm in Oakville, Ontario, shot back: “blah blah blah... it's always the capitalist....what about self indulgent employees who never retrain or take control of their options?”

    The pope’s tweet also got nearly 6,000 retweets and was “favorited” more than 2,500 times, a sign that on a day when the European Central Bank announced it would be cutting its key interest rate a quarter-point as employment in Europe still lags, some faithful appreciate an attack on corporate greed from Catholicism's top man.

    “Anyone who has lived in poverty and deep poverty — people are not really enjoying being poor. They are always, every day, thinking about what could take me out of this," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which helps residents of low-and moderate-income communities get access to banking services. "But they don’t have college degree, they don’t have a rich uncle. They don’t know someone who is about to give them an $80,000 job, and they don’t the contacts or the influence. Self-reliance works well when you have a lot to rely on.”

    Since the global financial collapse of 2008, unemployment rates around the world have surged. In the U.S., the painfully high 7.7 percent unemployment rate is among the lowest in the developed world.

    In Europe, unemployment reached 12.1 percent in March, an all-time high. In Spain, more than one in four are without a paycheck. In the Arab world, rising unemployment – largely among younger job seekers – fueled an “Arab spring” of social unrest in 2010 from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.  Since then, unemployment has continued to rise – to about 16 percent.

    This global surge in joblessness has sidelined a large segment of the generation that came of age during the Great Recession. The Economist magazine recently figured that the number of young people out of work globally is nearly as big as the population of the United States.

    Known for his humility in his own work, Francis has shunned many perks throughout the years. Back in his hometown of Buenos Aires, before he was elected pope, he rode city buses to get around, and lived in a plain apartment downtown as opposed to the opulent mansion he was entitled to as cardinal.

    And shortly after he was elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church, he washed the feet of a dozen inmates in a juvenile detention center in a religious rite as a humble servant of the faithful.

    As the pontiff’s pointed tweet made the rounds, another tweet came Thursday from someone better known for his financial opinions: Billionaire Warren Buffett joined Twitter for the first time, saying simply: "Warren is in the house."

    He picked up more than 81,000 followers in an hour.

    NBC's Amy Langfield contributed to this report.

     

  • Joblessness strikes more young people in Europe's wealthy north

    Eric Vidal / Reuters

    The face of northern Europe's jobless. Youth worker Mostafa Ameziane (L), 31, and unemployed Hamza Ahmadoun, 25, pose for a photograph in Antwerp.

    By Robin Emmott and Robert-Jan Bartunek, Reuters

    ANTWERP, Belgium — At 29, Samira Ahidar just got a permanent job, her first.

    Ahidar, who still lives with her parents, dropped out of school a decade ago and her adult life has been dominated by the search for work. She would still be jobless if it were not for a job creation scheme that employs her at an elderly care home.

    "I've no idea where I'll be in five years time," said Ahidar, dressed in an orange apron that comes with her new role. "It is so hard to find work, you feel like giving up."

    Ahidar does not live in Greece or Spain, countries where as many as one in two young people are without work, but in the wealthy Belgian port city of Antwerp. With its stunning 16th-century Gothic houses, the city is a world centre for diamond trading and boasts a cutting-edge fashion industry. It also has a fast-growing number of unemployed twentysomethings.

    Youth unemployment is notoriously a problem of southern Europe. What is less obvious, as the euro zone slips into its second recession in just three years, is the scale of the problem in the north.

    A quarter of 18-to-25 year olds in Antwerp are now jobless, up from 19 percent in 2008. In some parts of Brussels, the Belgian and European capital and the third-richest region in the European Union, youth joblessness is as high as 40 percent. In France, Britain and Sweden, as many as one in five young people are now out of work.

    The rising pool of jobless youth is fuelling class and racial divisions, according to youth workers and some politicians. Many experts blame joblessness for outbursts of violence such as last year's riots in Britain.

    And today's problem could have a big impact on Europe's future. The continent's labour force is set to decline by 50 million people over the next 50 years, according to the World Bank. Skilled, experienced new workers will be needed to support an ageing population.

    "Young people are being marginalised with major economic consequences," said Francois Robert, a social worker at the employment institute Bruxelles Formation. "The problems people are talking about in Greece and Spain are right outside the European Commission's door in Brussels."

    Vacancies, but no work
    Southern Europe has long struggled with youth unemployment. In Italy, the rate has not dropped below 20 percent in more than two decades, according to the EU's statistics office Eurostat. In Spain, the rate has averaged 30 percent since 1990.

    By contrast, in the United States, youth unemployment is 17 percent, up from just under 12 percent in December 2007. The European exception is Germany, where only 8 percent of young people aged 15 to 24 are out of work, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

    It is normal that unemployment goes up in tough times. But worryingly, some of the problems, even in northern Europe, are structural. In Belgium as elsewhere, these include a lack of skills, discrimination and the cushion of welfare payments that approach the minimum wage.

    Belgium has an open, high-tech economy and the world's 12th highest per capita income, but "the education we offer is not always in tune with what the market needs," says Pascal Smet, education minister for Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking half of the country.

    The shortcomings have important consequences. The gap between young people's skills and those required by employers means Belgium has one of the highest percentages in the industrialised world of young people who are not in employment, education or training, according to the OECD.

    It's not as if there are no jobs. Flanders, which is home to Antwerp, has a trade-friendly location between Germany's industrial belt and the North Sea that attracts multinationals. In 2011, the number of jobs on offer in the region - excluding temporary agency work — rose 17 percent from the year before. But there were only about three job seekers for every vacancy in March, according to the latest data available - the lowest level since 2000.

    Entrepreneur Frederic Bulcaen says he cannot find the staff he needs for his industrial ventilation company Typhoon, which deploys teams of engineers across Europe to install equipment to keep factories clean.

    "I just hired somebody with a master's in industrial engineering who was able to choose from 10 different companies that all wanted him," said Bulcaen, in an office overlooking stacks of shiny steel pipes and giant motors. "It is very, very difficult."

    Materials engineers are needed in industries such as aerospace and chemicals, but only about 15 of them graduate in Belgium every year, forcing companies to look abroad.

    Wanted: English speakers
    For some young people, basic education is the problem. To work in Brussels, for instance, English is a must-have: the city, often likened to Washington D.C., is packed with embassies, international organisations and industry lobbyists.

    About 36 percent of people in Brussels come from outside the European Union, and there's not much opportunity for monolingual French-speaking children of immigrants. The car plants and factories where they would have found work two decades ago have closed.

    Twenty-four-year-old Michel Ayim is a second-generation immigrant who spends his days with his friend Pierre Bello, smoking cigarettes and listening to French rap in front of the paint-flaked warehouses along Brussels' industrial-era canal. Just a few stops away on the metro are the shiny complexes of the EU institutions, where members of the European Parliament earn 95,000 euros ($120,000) a year plus benefits.

    "I go to a temping agency, but I get turned away because I don't speak good English," said Ayim, who has not had a permanent job since leaving school. "So maybe I work as a waiter for a day, but I can only dream of a good salary."

    Children of immigrants - who mostly came from North Africa - face particular hurdles. One in five people in Belgium are of immigrant origin but people from outside Europe are often poorly integrated, and immigrants rarely fill professional jobs.

    Fewer than half the non-EU immigrants who have yet to obtain Belgian nationality were in a job in May this year, according to a study by the Flanders job agency VDAB.

    "They should have told our parents how important education is and that you have to push your children to get a qualification," said Ahidar, whose parents came from North Africa in the 1960s to work in Belgian industry.

    Some children of immigrants say they are dissuaded from gaining useful skills. Jobless 26-year-old Rashid, whose parents came from Morocco, said his "teachers at primary school used to tell my parents I was a talented and creative student."

    "But when I moved to secondary education, they immediately started telling them I should follow a career in manual labour," he said, sipping mint tea and watching Latin American football in a Moroccan cafe in Antwerp.

    Some Belgian employers also discriminate on race despite laws against it. An investigation by recruitment agency federation Federgon found a third of agencies agreed to send only white Belgians to fill vacancies during the past year.

    One 25-year-old, Hamza Ahmadoun, said he had done around 60 jobs from security to telesales in the six years since leaving school. "I speak Dutch, English and Arabic, but I don't get a chance, it is pure discrimination," he said. "In the morning I get up, I pray and see what the day brings."

    But it is not just the children of immigrants who are struggling.

    Anna De Cock, 24, a white Belgian born in the Netherlands, works sweeping Antwerp's tree-lined avenues as part of another job creation scheme. "I am lucky to be here," she said, dressed in a bulky jump suit and carrying a black broom.

    De Cock wanted to become a chef and took jobs washing dishes in dark, back-alley kitchens, but was unable to find steady work, lost interest and stopped showing up.

    Stuck on welfare
    Then there's the issue of unemployment benefits in northern Europe, which for a single young person are more than double that of the United States. Belgium is even more generous than that.

    A Belgian school leaver with a diploma can receive benefits of around 900 euros ($1,200) a month after a year of unemployment. The minimum wage of 1,400 euros a month before tax, which De Cock earns, is one of the world's highest.

    After deductions, there's only about a 150-euro difference between unemployment benefit and the pay for low-skilled work, said Peter Stappaerts, director of Werkhaven, a job scheme in Antwerp. "So unfortunately it is easier to stay home and collect benefits." On top of this, young mothers have an added disincentive: to work, they have to pay for childcare.

    Over the past year, riots in Britain and France have been linked with the frustration of unemployment. There has also been rioting in Antwerp and Brussels. Earlier this year, protesters hurled bins and metal barriers at a police station in a poor area of Brussels after a Muslim woman was arrested for refusing to remove a face veil, banned in Belgium.

    "We are looking at the emergence of a generation of young people who have always been unemployed," said Patrick Manelickx, the head of Brussels-based youth centre JES that trains youngsters and tries to get them into work.

    "There is a feeling of frustration, of anger among many of them, that they don't have a future," he said.

    The European Commission is pushing the bloc's 27 countries to set up schemes to offer training or further study to any young person who does not find a job within four months of leaving school. Some countries have set aside funds to support this.

    Governments elsewhere have moved to reform benefits or education, and encourage youth employment with lower taxes and less job security. In France, the government is fast-tracking a job-creation scheme.

    But Belgium is forcing through around 13 billion euros in budget cuts this year and says it cannot afford such a plan, although it may reform its education system. Flanders' education minister Smet wants to make unemployment benefits dependent on trying to find work or study. "I am all for solidarity in our society," he said. "But you can't have something for nothing."

    Ahidar's new job as a driver gives her hope of starting her own taxi business ferrying Antwerp's elderly about. But she cannot get bank financing.

    "I had the character to keep looking for work," Ahidar said. "Others didn't and ended up in crime, and the job situation is so bad that you start to understand why."

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  • College education not always ticket to better jobs worldwide

    Yannis Behrakis / Reuters

    Manolis Ouranos, a 30-year-old cook, works for the Mavros Gatos (Black Cat) tavern in Psiri neighboorhood in central Athens. Manolis studied at Athens Technology University (TEI) for four years where he received a degree in civil engineering. He hoped to find a permanent job in public sector infrastructure but has been working as a cook for four months instead. He now takes cooking lessons which he funds with his salary as a cook.

    Nearly 75 million people ages 15 to 24 are unemployed worldwide and the U.N. labor office predicts “the same high level” for at least the next four years.

    For eager university graduates in the crisis-hit European Union where one in five people under the age of 24 are out of work, finding a job is almost impossible. However, the problem isn’t confined to the EU. It’s a global problem and the U.N. expects 12.7 percent of youth globally to be unemployed in 2012. The International Labour Organisation also warns that many are trapped in low paid and low skilled jobs and others have simply given up looking.

    In order to illustrate the problem, Reuters photographed  portraits of graduates from around the world who have been unable to find work in their degrees and have ended up in service industry jobs.

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    Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

    Francesca Baldi, 32, takes care of a seven-month-old baby in a private household in Rome on May 11. Baldi studied for five years at university in Pisa where she received a degree and a doctorate in literature and philosophy. She hoped to find a job as a teacher but has been working as a childminder for five months.

    Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

    Jessica Mazza, a 28 year-old waitress, serves a customer at Novel cafe in Santa Monica, Calif. Mazza studied for five years at Ball State University where she received a degree in painting and business management. She hoped to find a job as an artist but has been working in the cafe for just under a year. Picture taken, April 24.

    Noor Khamis / Reuters

    Denis Onyango Olang (right), a 26 year-old assistant cook, prepares food in a dimly lit kitchen at a hotel in Nairobi's Kibera slum in the Kenyan capital. Onyango Olang studied statistics and chemistry at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology where he received a degree in science. He has been searching for permanent employment for two years but has decided to make a living working in the slums for the last eight months.

    Miguel Vidal / Reuters

    Tania Leon, a 29 year-old stewardess, poses for a picture inside a bus in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Leon studied psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela and received a degree in 2006. She was hoping to find a job as a psychologist but has been working as a stewardess for the last two years.

    Dado Ruvic / Reuters

    Almin Dzafic, a 30 year-old waiter, serves customers in the Galerija Boris Smoje cafe in Sarajevo. Dzafic studied for four years at Sarajevo University where he received a degree in civil engineering. For the last four years he has tried to find a job in art restoration but has been working as a waiter for two years. He sees his future outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina because he can not find a job.

    Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

    Wael Abo El Saoud, a 25 year-old farmer, harvests wheat on Miet Radie farm about 37 miles northeast of Cairo. Wael studied for four years at Benha University where he received a degree in commerce. He hoped to find a job as a bank accountant but has been working as a farmer for the last five years. He earns between 30 to 60 Egypt pounds a day but does not work all year round.

    Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

    Francesco Foglia, 37, poses for a picture as he works as a street sweeper in downtown Rome. Foggia studied for six years at university in Rome where he received a degree and a doctorate in industrial chemistry. He hoped to find a job as a researcher but has been working as a street sweeper for Rome's municipality for two years. Picture taken on April 29.

    Peter Andrews / Reuters

    Marcin Lubowicki, a 28 year-old deputy manager of a McDonald's restaurant, shows his university diploma in front of the fast food chain in the Arkadia shopping mall, in Warsaw. Lubowicki, who has degree in Russian language from Warsaw University, has been working for McDonald's since 2007. He is planning to stay in his job.

  • Man cuts off foot, throws it in furnace to avoid job assignment

    By msnbc.com staff

    Hours before unemployment officials were to determine whether he was physically fit for work, an Austrian man sawed off his left foot with an electric saw, Austrian broadcaster ORF reported.

    The 56-year-old man had just learned that his benefits could be slashed if he did not accept work found for him, the Daily Mail reported.

    He reportedly placed the severed foot in a wood stove to make sure doctors could not reattach it to his leg.

    On Monday, after his wife and son had left the house, Hans Url, positioned his left leg against an electric saw in the boiler room and severed his foot above the ankle. Images from the scene show an electric table saw – apparently wiped clean – surrounded by shallow pools of blood. On the stove were a lighter and ashtray filled with cigarette butts.   

    Bleeding profusely and on the verge of death, Url called an ambulance. Emergency staff found him covered in blood, and they retrieved the foot from the fire.

    Url was airlifted to a hospital in Graz. Hospital officials said he nearly died from loss of blood, according to the Daily Mail. Url is now out of danger, but doctors were not able to reattach his foot because it was too badly burned.  

    "He wants to work, but gets nothing suitable," Monika, Url's wife of 36 years, told the Kronen Zeitung. "My husband felt so worthless."

    On Tuesday, Url was transferred to the psychiatric ward of the Graz regional hospital. "He apologized to me and told me how sorry he was," Monika told the Austrian newspaper. "He did it deliberately at the time when we -- my son and I -- were out of the house."

    The rescue helicopter was waiting in front of the house when Monika returned. "Now I know that my husband was very scared of this health examination," she told the Krone. "He wants to work. But the job he imagines for himself doesn't exist."

    Url's daughter Petra said her father once worked on a golf course, and he was happiest when working outdoors, according to the Austrian paper. She said he had received a number of such jobs in the past, but they only lasted several months at a time.

    Police spokesman Franz Fasching said police were investigating the case as an attempted suicide. “The planning was meticulous," Fasching said.

    Meticulous, perhaps, but possibly not a success. Url may still qualify for work despite the amputation, the Daily Mail reported.

    The Daily Mail quoted Hermann Gössinger, spokesman for the unemployment center where Url was supposed to have been examined, as saying that “this is a tragic case but it will not help the man. He will be assessed once he is out of hospital and we will see what work we can find for him.”

    Url has been unemployed -- with brief interruptions -- since 2003. The Kronen Zeitung reported he suffers from depression. In 2010, he spent 11 days in a psychiatric clinic in Graz.

    "The family is at least firmly behind him," Monika told the paper. "Together we can get over this."

    Reuters contributed to this report.

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