When British Prime Minister Theresa May responded to the London Bridge terrorist attack this month with the words “enough is enough,” it wasn’t just campaign rhetoric.

It sums up a wearing down of patience across Western Europe, which has born witness to over a dozen major terrorist attacks in 30 months.

Britain had been spared the barrage, much of it inspired by the so-called Islamic State, until it shifted to the British stage this spring, with four attacks since March. The first three were perpetrated by Islamist extremists in the name of religion, taking the lives of innocent victims commuting from work, out walking, dancing at concerts, or celebrating. The youngest was just 8 years old. The latest was carried out Sunday night against Muslims worshiping at a mosque during the holy month of Ramadan, confirming the dread that many have felt amid a fraying of nerves: that “enough is enough” will give way to the most violent forms of Islamophobia.

In the middle stand community groups and faith leaders, who are trying to foster dialogue and counter the hotheadedness that threatens to roll back years of work on co-existence. “In the current climate of the world we live in, there’s a need for more understanding,” says Imam Yunus Dudhwala, the head of chaplaincy at Barts Health NHS Trust, a group of hospitals serving East London.

He was speaking at a recent “sunset walk” – after the London Bridge incident and before the latest attack – that started on the sun-dappled steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and ended at the East London Mosque. “The more we meet, the more we have dialogue and events together, it’s an opportunity to understand each other,” he says. “It breaks the barriers of fear, of the unknown.”

Standing beside the imam was Jonathan Baker, the Bishop of Fulham. “It’s hugely important that we all witness the fact that we stand together as citizens of the one city,” he says. “We all want to live in peace, in safety, in mutual respect with one another.”

'Not comfortable in your own area'

That can seem a lofty goal these days, with mistrust running high between communities across many quarters of Europe.

The suspect of Sunday’s attack near the Finsbury Park Mosque was named as Darren Osborne, a resident of Wales who allegedly said at the scene that he wished to “kill all Muslims” as he drove a van into a crowd. One person was killed. It immediately generated more shrill reaction, with some right-wing extremists calling it revenge for jihadi violence, while Islamic extremists called for a “wake up” in the Muslim community. The attack was all the more contentious amid media reports that the mosque, once the stage of radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, had recently been recognized for its efforts to fight extremism.

It comes as hate crimes are on the rise. In the week following the London Bridge rampage, reported attacks against Muslims increased by fivefold, according to figures released by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

Nida Mumith, a teen volunteer with British nonprofit Muslim Aid, which sponsored the sunset walk, says she and her friends are frightened by such statistics. “It creates this sense of not being comfortable in your own area – wherever you go you’ll hear about someone being beaten up because they’re Muslim, or [about] hateful comments thrown at them,” she says.

Taking part in the sunset walk, which was initially organized to raise funds in support of Syrian refugees but expanded to condemn extreme religious violence in Britain and around the world, is her way of helping to counter intolerance. “We’re all here to show unity. Everyone is sympathetic to each other’s beliefs and differences,” she says.

Tensions in Britain are high, but the strains are felt everywhere. As London was reeling Monday, a car crashed into a police vehicle on Paris’s Champs-Elysees, what authorities call a probable terrorist attack. Such incidents barely dominate the news anymore – after three major attacks in France have left 231 dead and hundreds injured since the first on the offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015.

Muslim groups have shown the same degree of exasperation over what are starting to feel like incessant strikes. The London-based Quilliam Foundation released a stern statement following the early June attacks in the British capital, seeming to align with Ms. May’s sentiment.

“Enough is enough – we need action now and not tip-toeing around the issue,” Quilliam Foundation CEO Haras Rafiq said. “The [terrorists’] ideology has its roots in Islamist-inspired Salafi Jihadism and we must all admit the problem before we can attempt to challenge it.”

Meanwhile, Muhammad Manwar Ali, a former jihadist fighter who now combats Islamic extremism through his organization JIMAS, tweeted in support of the British government’s controversial anti-radicalization program, PREVENT.

Grassroots or state-led efforts?

Still, many fear such programs are counterproductive to trust.

"Basically the state is asking people to spy on each other, and that’s really not conducive to an atmosphere of trust”, says Amina Yaqin, a senior lecturer in postcolonial Studies at SOAS-University of London. “It also gives groups like ISIS a real opportunity to say, ‘Look, you’re mistrusted anyway, so come over to our side.'"

She says interfaith and grassroots initiatives are generally more effective than state-led programs in fostering the kind of mutual vulnerability that engenders cooperation – the kind on view as the two-mile sunset walk ends at the East London Mosque on a recent Saturday. Here the evening meal, or iftar, to break the fast of Ramadan, is distributed in yellow styrofoam containers. But first a group of speakers reflects on the challenges ahead, even more important after the attack Sunday on the Finsbury Park Mosque, just a few miles away.

“How do we respond to bombs and murder in Tehran, Syria, Manchester, London? By refusing the fragmentation and the fear that these killers wish to instill into our open society,” says the Rev. Alan Green, rector of St. John Church on Bethnal Green and chair of the Tower Heights Interfaith Forum. “In the face of fear, murder, and ignorance, we continue to proclaim that we are better together and have no place for hate…. In the end, the way we will defeat those who seek to divide us – we do it simply by talking and listening.”

• Sara Miller Llana contributed reporting from Paris.

COURTESY OF PERFORMANCE PATTERN AND MACHINE

Jason Williams (l.) trains Rep. Cheri Bustos on the shop floor of Performance Pattern & Machine in Peoria, Ill. By putting herself in the shoes of workers like Mr. Williams, a father of five who says he found her ‘personable,’ she is better able to represent them in Washington.

On a sunny morning in May, Rep. Cheri Bustos showed up to work at a machine shop in south Peoria, where grain silos hug the Illinois River. Protective eye gear on, the Democratic congresswoman was ready for another day of “Cheri on Shift” – shadowing workers on the job when she’s home in her district.

But this was not going to be anything like the time she processed fish, drove a forklift, or spot-welded. Guided by her “trainer” at Performance Pattern & Machine, the congresswoman approached a panel of controls on the noisy shop floor and – drumroll, please – pressed a button.

Yep. That was it. Everybody laughed, but the actual work wasn’t really the point. During her “training,” she started up a conversation with the operator of the computer-driven, metal-cutting machine, Jason Williams. It lasted a good 10 minutes. Even before this, she kept breaking off from her shop-floor tour to chat with employees: A young apprentice. A longtimer of 27 years. An Iraq War veteran.

Along the way, she asked more questions than a census-taker. Not just whether they have any kids, but about the kids. Not just how long they have worked here, but what they were doing before this. Not just about their training, but what they do for fun and whether they took a vacation last year.

“We’ve had other politicians come through here before that had no real interest in talking to somebody,” said Kris Woll, a young machinist with a “Bernie” sticker on his toolbox. “She ... had a big smile and came up and introduced herself within moments of seeing me. That, to me, meant a lot.”

Showing up. Listening to constituents. Following through. It sounds simple enough. But it is an aspect of politics that is undervalued in an age of social media and in a region of the country that largely abandoned Democrats for Donald Trump. If the party wants to regain the House in 2018, and rise again in the larger sense, it will need to win in the Midwest and gain the trust of Trump voters – as Representative Bustos has done, observers say.

Last November, she won her district by a healthy 20-point margin. A vast swath of northwestern Illinois, where corn and soybean fields stretch to the horizon, it’s the kind of rural area where Mr. Trump triumphed. He won this district by a smidgen. Still, 1 in 5 Trump voters also backed Bustos, the granddaughter of a hog farmer.

How she performed so strongly is a vital question for her party. Only 11 other Democrats managed to win in congressional districts that Trump also captured. Progressives argue for staunchly liberal politics and a strategy of resistance to the president. Bustos, however, implores her colleagues to hear out Trump supporters, foster a more inclusive politics, and develop a specific strategy to win back the heartland.

“The vast majority of this nation is still rural, and people don’t want to feel like they’ve been forgotten. That’s human nature. People want to feel like they’ve been listened to. And as public servants, we owe them that,” said Bustos in an interview in Peoria. Democrats, she adds, “need to stop acting like everyone else is a villain.”

Zach Gibson/AP

Speaker Paul Ryan (r.) poses with Rep. Cheri Bustos on Jan. 3 as she begins another term in office.

Lone Midwesterner in House leadership

Bustos seems to be having some sway. In December, Democrats in the House elected her co-chair of their policy and messaging committee, making her the only Midwesterner in the House Democratic leadership. It was a corrective step after Democrats’ painful loss of states such as Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the presidential race. Still, nearly two-thirds of the top posts in the House legislative committees are held by representatives from the coasts.

“I can’t sit there and be meek and mild” in leadership meetings when the coastal voices dominate, she says. That determination seems to come naturally to this star collegiate athlete known for her furious rebound in basketball. It helps, too, that she used to be an investigative reporter.

The congresswoman has personally pressed Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Tom Perez to form a “rural council” to coordinate a Midwest strategy. And she’s working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is recruiting and training candidates to win back the House, on training programs – touting her “Build the Bench” boot camp to prep newbie candidates for local office.

The DCCC is designating a point person for the Midwest, according to Bustos. It is targeting a total of 79 Republican seats for the 2018 cycle, including 21 seats in the heartland. Democrats need to win 24 seats to take back the majority, and Republicans are increasingly nervous about the prospect of them doing so.

“The heartland is going to be critically important to the battleground that we’ve laid out,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D) of New Mexico, chairman of the DCCC, at a May press conference. He credited Bustos and others for keeping them focused on the region. That still leaves the question, though, of how to win the hearts and minds of working-class Middle America.

Courtesy of the office of Rep. Cheri Bustos

Representative Bustos, shown here at a ‘Cheri on Shift’ event at Moline Forge in Moline, Ill., holds boot camps to help Democrats rebuild their ranks.

‘Supermarket Saturdays’

To be sure, Bustos was helped in her first congressional race in 2012 by Democratic redistricting that roped in a portion of two cities, Peoria and Rockford, that trend Democratic. And she faced no formidable competition last year. But much of Illinois’s 17th District is dotted with farms and small towns with conservative voters, and the congresswoman has steadily increased her margin of victory with each election. She won all 14 of her counties last year. “You know that old saying, ‘Half the game is just showing up’ – I think that’s part of it,” says Bustos, when asked how Democrats can regain the trust of people who voted for Trump.

Showing up is not so easy in this district of 7,000 square miles. She makes sure to visit all counties each year and stays close to her constituents by working her “shifts.” She also does “Supermarket Saturdays,” asking mothers and grandparents picking over produce or pulling cereal from the shelf what they want her to know before she heads back to Washington.

People complained that Hillary Clinton neglected the heartland states, and elected Democrats need to ensure they don’t do the same, says Emily Parcell, a consultant who worked on the Iowa presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton, and is a top adviser to Bustos.

“We’ve just gotten so far away from retail politics, where candidates go talk to the voters,” says Ms. Parcell, speaking of both parties and all levels of office. “The lesson from Congresswoman Bustos is that she’s there.”

Her one-on-one discussions, with everyone from factory workers to grocery store shoppers, help Bustos understand the economy’s effect on people’s lives – for instance, by giving her a sense of how much disposable income someone might have to spend on a vacation. This informs her work in Washington, whether it’s fighting for or against something, or writing legislation.

The problem in 2016, she says, was that Democrats campaigned on a message that “everything was good” and they were going to build on that. “Well, things don’t feel so good to a lot of people.”

Handling hot-button issues

Though she comes from a line of farmers, Bustos also grew up talking politics around the kitchen table. Her farmer grandfather was a representative in the Illinois statehouse and stayed with the family in Springfield during legislative sessions. Her father was a political reporter and columnist who became a top aide to the Illinois lieutenant governor and a US senator from the state.

“I’ve known Cheri since she was a little girl,” says Sen. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois, now the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate’s minority leadership. He worked for her father, and she baby-sat his children. “I know what her dad taught her. First, honesty. You never lie. And you tell the truth. It sounds so basic and it’s so important.”

Except for her years at the University of Maryland, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, she’s spent her whole life in the heartland and knows how to navigate a socially conservative region. For instance, Bustos says she doesn’t talk about a typical hot-button issue – abortion.

She’s Roman Catholic and in favor of abortion rights, but she doesn’t see such rights as a litmus test for Democrats, and it’s not a topic that comes up naturally on the shop floor or in the grocery aisle. When Mr. Perez, the DNC chairman, commented recently that “every Democrat” should support a woman’s right to choose, she groaned, because it sends the message that all Democrats agree with him. “That’s hurtful in regions like this,” she says.

Indeed, observers say it helped sink the campaign of an antiabortion Democrat who was running for mayor in Omaha, Neb., this spring.

On another hot-button issue – guns – Bustos supports some firearms restrictions, such as for known or suspected terrorists and those who are mentally ill. But she usually starts a conversation about guns by saying her husband – Gerry Bustos, the sheriff of Rock Island County – wears a gun every day. (He also sports a barbed-wire tattoo and the letters “CBGB” – the couple’s initials.)

Bustos had a chance to banter about her own experience with guns while at Performance Pattern, when she walked into the office of Scott Herman, one of the owners. She looked at a picture of his son in a football uniform, asked about him, and then, with motherly pride, bragged about her oldest son, who had gone to Iowa State and been No. 2 in the nation in collegiate trapshooting. “Awesome. Wow,” said Mr. Herman.

For Christmas, her son took his children to Tennessee for wild-boar hunting. She doesn’t hunt, she explained, but “I do like to go to the shooting range. For me, that’s fun.”

That was the gun handshake, followed along the way by bonding with workers over sports. She doesn’t bring it up, but she was inducted into the Illinois College Sports Hall of Fame. She’s got biceps like Michelle Obama’s, and when she’s on recess, she works out with her husband at the YMCA at 4:30 every morning.

The key to talking with folks who may not agree with you, she says, is “not talking down to people, ever, because their views might be different on women’s reproductive rights or guns.”

Or on Trump. Which is why Bustos takes care not to “bad-mouth” the president, as she puts it. But she does point out where he’s failed on his promises, and she condemns his proposed 21 percent budget cut to the Department of Agriculture as harmful to every town in her district.

When touring workplaces, she described the health-care bill that passed the House in early May as “terrible” – but she never talked about it in terms of R’s and D’s.

She’s particularly attuned to veterans. Since she learned from a concerned vet that flags used by the military were made in China, she has succeeded in requiring the Defense Department to purchase only US flags made in America.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Rita Ali, an African-American candidate for Peoria city council who ran in a majority white and Republican part of town, says Rep. Cheri Bustos’s boot camp was an invaluable resource.

Boot camps for rising Democrats

Not every candidate can grow up in a political family, excel at sports, and become a reporter, observes Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University in Ames.

But anyone can learn to ask questions and listen to voters and constituents, she says: “All they have to do is focus on the person they’re talking to, and not so much on themselves.”

At Ms. Bystrom’s Center for Women and Politics, workshops on how to run for office offer a session exclusively on listening.
Bustos, too, is offering campaign workshops, looking to franchise her success.

Frustrated with the lack of Democratic candidates in the 2016 election cycle, she held her first one-day boot camp last year to teach political newcomers how to run for local office. She aims to rebuild the Democrats’ ranks from the ground up – offering her personal expertise, which makes the workshop distinctive.

Bustos is talking with party chairs in eight Midwestern states about expanding the program. “I am not one bit proprietary about this,” she says, explaining that her shift work at local businesses, grocery-store interviews, and boot camps are easily replicable.

The boot camps have graduated winners. Out of 12 alumni from a February workshop, eight won elections this spring. One of them, Rita Ali, lost her bid for Peoria City Council by one slim vote. It was a huge disappointment, but the college administrator and community activist is going to run for an at-large seat – and she could well make it over the finish line.

Ms. Ali, an African-American who ran in a majority white and Republican part of Peoria, says Bustos inspired her to keep going when things got tough.
Ali says she was impressed to learn that Bustos doesn’t delete attacks against her on her Facebook page. The congresswoman explained that “you have to stay the course, you have to stay strong, but you have to respect that people have a difference of opinion.”

And that is how Ali ran her campaign. It was for a nonpartisan office, granted, but people knew she was a Democrat. She says she won the support of Republicans simply by allowing them to get to know her through personal contact, such as knocking on their doors.

They lost their “fear” of her, she says, when they discovered they want the same things – fair property taxes, safe neighborhoods – and have the same concerns, like the pending relocation of Caterpillar from its Peoria headquarters. Some Trump supporters even hosted events for her.

When asked to describe a Trump voter, she quickly responds, “They’re regular people.”

That may elicit howls of protest from progressives on the coasts. But it’s an answer that no doubt would please Bustos.

(Editor's Note: This story was updated to correct the state affiliation of Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D) of New Mexico.)

Juan Ignacio Llana/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Sarai Noriega, a former engineer, has gone back to school in Bilbao, Spain, to learn robotics. A single mother of two, she says she feels that a blue-collar job will allow her to make good money yet better control her hours.

Koldo Mentxaka was always considered the “brains” in the family. So it was no surprise when he, the oldest of four brothers, completed a university degree – the only one in his family to do so – and then went on to get his master’s in computer engineering. After working at IBM and later as a computer consultant in his hometown of Bilbao, on Spain’s northern coast, he lost his job in 2013 in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“Not you,” he remembers his mother saying to him at the time. “Of the four of you, not you.”

He tried to keep his cool. After all, he’d already had a successful career spanning almost two decades. Yet months of joblessness passed, one after the other. “I was sending out résumés everywhere, doing online courses, but at the end you lose hope. You think, ‘am I so bad that no one wants to hire me?’”

After 2-1/2 years of unemployment – and at age 40 – he made a decision. He would forget his elite university degree, his long business lunches. He was going to trade school. “This was my way out, the way to recycle myself,” he says on a recent morning, a few months away from finishing a two-year course that’s positioned him for a job programming machinery at an industrial software company.

Juan Ignacio Llana/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

‘I was sending out résumés everywhere, doing online courses, but at the end you lose hope. You think, "Am I so bad that no one wants to hire me?"' – Koldo Mentxaka, a software engineer who went to trade school to start a new career

Mr. Mentxaka is undergoing the kind of retraining and career reinvention that societies will increasingly face as the world confronts some of the biggest workforce changes in more than a century. Technological change, the decline of manufacturing, the restructuring of “white collar” industries, globalization – all are dramatically changing the nature of work and the types of jobs that will be available in the future. 

“Clearly the period of rapid industrialization in the 1800s, the creation of the factory economy, was a big change, but that occurred over a pretty long period,” says Mark Muro, an expert in advanced and inclusive economic development at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I actually think this is one of the most disruptive moments we’ve seen, because there are more types of occupations facing more challenges.”

Most attention has been paid to blue-collar workers whose industries have been wiped out by dislocation and technological progress. Yet they are not the only laborers suffering. In Europe, the debt crisis has eased, but low-growth economies mean a dearth of job openings – particularly high-quality jobs – has persisted for all types of workers, including midlevel career people such as Mentxaka. And youth unemployment rates of more than 30 percent in some European countries have given rise to a generation of underpaid college graduates surviving on temporary contracts.

Even among those who have jobs, change is the new reality, adding to the importance of retraining. In the United States, for instance, the average person now can expect to change jobs 10 to 15 times over a working lifetime, often with changes of career in the mix. Years ago people pursued a single career path for the majority of their lives.

In Europe, where labor laws make it tougher to hire and fire people and professional reinvention is not as prevalent, the churn is less pronounced but no less significant. One survey in 2015 found that nearly half of all workers in the United Kingdom intended to switch jobs within three years. The average in Europe overall was 34 percent.

To help ease these transitions, Europe is offering some of the most innovative solutions. While its rigid laws and zealous unions make labor reforms difficult, Europe nonetheless far outspends the US on labor market programs, puts more emphasis on apprenticeships and vocational training, and generally places higher value on helping displaced workers.

The US, to be sure, has an economy that is outperforming Europe’s. But many experts say that Americans still have a lot to learn from Europe as workers struggle to find their way in the new economy, not to mention that retraining programs can change the tenor of politics: Some say they could act as a buffer against the more radical elements of populism sweeping the world, fueled in part by angry, unemployed workers. 

“We know full well that the proper handling of the [economic] ruptures has to do with proper social safety nets: with education, with training, with the capacity of the labor market to relocate people,” says Pascal Lamy, former director general of the World Trade Organization and now president emeritus of the Paris-based think tank Notre Europe/Jacques Delors Institute. 

Globalization has been disrupting jobs for decades. That’s why the US Labor Department enacted the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program in 1962 – to help workers displaced by jobs moving offshore and bolster support for trade liberalization. Europeans were thinking about it even earlier, in 1951, when they formed the bloc that would later turn into the European Union.

Such programs have gotten a new look as automation has added to uncertainties about the future of work, especially after the recent financial crisis. And the pace of change is only likely to pick up. A McKinsey & Co. report in 2015 showed that 60 percent of all occupations could see 30 percent or more of their activities automated in the future. That’s not just low-skilled work but jobs in fields such as mortgage lending and health care.

Brahim Ben Addi could easily have succumbed to the changes sweeping through industrialized economies – especially globalization. He started work right out of high school at the French car manufacturer PSA Group, mounting airbags and brakes at a plant outside Paris. He thought he’d work there until he retired, just as his father had. But PSA closed the factory in 2013, in the face of increased competition from overseas automakers.

“It’s like going 180 kilometers per hour, then braking to 10,” says Mr. Ben Addi, a father of three, who worked at the plant for 13 years.

Entrepreneurial by nature, Ben Addi had already been learning breadmaking on his own time. His generous wage insurance and payout from the company – more than €65,000 ($73,000) – allowed him to trade working on an assembly line for kneading dough. He opened up his own bakery, La Gourman dise, in his neighborhood in a Parisian suburb. 

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

'It's hard. If you lose your job, you have unemployment [insurance]. Here if i lose my job, I lose a lot of money. You have to have courage.' – Brahim Ben Addi (at his shop) on starting his own bakery outside Paris after getting laid off as an autoworker

In three years, he has become something of a local phenomenon. His flour-dusted “tradition” baguette was named the best in his community, no small accolade in France. Now he wants to open up a bakery in Paris and win best baguette of the city, an honor that would allow him to serve the Élysée Palace for a year.

“It’s hard,” says Ben Addi of being an entrepreneur, as he stands behind the counter of his bakery in a crisp white smock, catering to a lunchtime crowd. “If you lose your job, you have unemployment [insurance]. Here if I lose my job, I lose a lot of money. You have to have courage.”

Ben Addi received some of the money to start his new venture from the European Globalization Adjustment Fund (EGF), which, like the TAA, is intended to help retrain laid-off workers. The EGF recently expanded its assistance to include workers who lost jobs during the global financial crisis and youths in regions disproportionately affected by foreign competition who are neither working nor studying. 

Yet fired European workers get far more help than just EGF grants. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), France and Germany spend much more on labor market adjustment programs than the US does – including on wage insurance, support for starting new companies, and access to training. France and Germany spend 0.99 percent and 0.66 percent of their gross domestic product respectively on such programs, compared with 0.11 percent for the US.

It’s clear that “social protection in Europe is much more developed than in the US,” says Baudouin Baudru, whose portfolio at the European Commission includes the EGF. “It is in the DNA, the history of the development of Europe.”

Some would argue, of course, that too much government help and financial protection are bad for economies: Generous unemployment benefits can discourage people from finding work.

The US, for its part, fosters more of a bootstrap spirit than most countries in Europe. This can be good for workers and creation generally, says Mr. Muro, but not necessarily for those in need. It can aggravate a mismatch between skills and what’s needed for the jobs of the future. “I think that divide is one of the great flaws of the US system,” says Muro.

Many point to Nordic countries as examples of smart collaboration between government, industry, and workers. They have a long history of consensus in labor relations, with unions and employers working together to head off debilitating protests. But the arrangement also serves to prepare workers for the realities of modern economies.

Sweden, for instance, relies on “job security councils” – nonprofits funded by employers that work with employees, employers, and unions to identify where new jobs are and to retrain workers for them. Workers, as a result, are less prone to fight to hang onto jobs that may become obsolete. Eighty-five percent of fired workers in Sweden find new jobs within a year, the highest rate of OECD member countries.

“It makes it possible to push structural change in society,” says Jesper Roine, an associate professor at the Stockholm School of Economics who sat on a Swedish “Future of Work” commission. “You get individual people who are not afraid of change simply because they know, ‘if something happens to me, I’m not totally on my own; there will be some kind of retraining.’ ”

France and other European countries are currently wrestling with how much government involvement there should be in helping workers cope with the new economy. François Béharel, president of Randstad France, the French branch of the global employment agency, says he’d like to see officials doing more to help college graduates and companies that can’t find workers with the skills they need.

In France, the youth unemployment rate is nearly 22 percent; in Spain it’s close to 40 percent, in Greece more than 45 percent. Mr. Béharel says these numbers could go down if governments took a more active role in spelling out which jobs and salaries are connected to specific degrees. “As it is now, the students have no idea, so when they finish [school], they find themselves unemployed,” he says.

At the same time, 50 percent of employers in France report they have trouble finding workers with the right talents, compared with 40 percent in the EU on average, according to European Commission figures. “Every day we are lacking welders, sheet metal workers, plumbers,” Béharel says. “We should be promoting the blue-collar work that corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.”

Regis Duvignau/Reuters/File

Jobless for more than a year, Alexandre (l.) interviewed for a job with a manager at Martin & Monteils, a construction firm in Pessac, France, in 2013. He lived with his mother to save money.

To do that requires, first, changing perceptions at home. “Parents need to understand that even if they want their children to become white-collar workers, there are many, many more jobs for blue-collar workers,” he says. It’s an idea best exemplified in Germany – in the form of an apprenticeship program that makes blue-collar work seem “noble.”

The country’s widely lauded vocational-training program has helped keep youth unemployment down to about 6.5 percent, far below the average rates in other European nations and in the US. Its two-pronged approach gives students a chance to learn theories in the classroom while honing their skills as drywallers, insulation installers, carpenters, and boat builders on the job through apprenticeships. According to German government statistics, about two-thirds of trainees get jobs with the companies they’ve apprenticed with. “In some fields [young people] with a vocation qualification are even more sought after than university graduates,” a government website proudly declares.

That’s something that Ander Cabrera knows all too well. He is in his first year of robotics at the Salesianos Deusto professional training school in Bilbao – the same school that Mentxaka attends. Mr. Cabrera already has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of the Basque Country. But when he graduated last spring, he realized the chances of finding a good full-time job with benefits were slim. He watched as friends accepted temporary jobs that eventually left them unemployed. While he considered getting a master’s degree, in the end he decided that trade school was the smartest choice, particularly given that Spain, since 2012, has modeled its programs after the German approach. “I hope vocational school gives me an edge,” he says.

Classmate Sarai Noriega has her own reasons for wanting to get vocational training. Like many others here, she got a university degree, in this case in construction engineering. She even found a job. But she didn’t like the long hours she had to work, which weren’t viable for her as a single mother of two. She watched her blue-collar counterparts clocking in and out for the same salary that she made and decided to change careers. The price of the full-time program she is taking in automation and robotics is relatively cheap, about €80 ($90) a month, which was also an attraction.

“This was the fastest way to get a new job,” she says, struggling to wire a circuit board. “Many single mothers are in this situation. This could be a solution for them.”

This “reverse migration” from white-collar to blue-collar jobs is a trend gathering force in Spain and across Europe. Yet Juan Carlos Lago, director of studies at Salesianos Deusto, doesn’t necessarily see it as a positive sign. “If things were ‘normal,’ people who studied at university would leave university and start working,” he says. “But with things the way they are, we are starting to see a return of people who already completed their degrees. I’m not sure if it’s a step backwards or not.”

Either way, there’s little doubt that trade school and apprenticeships are becoming more valued in Spanish society. “Trade school used to be for the ‘poor son,’ or the one who had a hard time with books,” Mr. Lago says. “That’s not the case anymore.”

A return to    blue-collar work is not just a matter of pragmatism. When the American writer Matthew B. Crawford, who has a PhD in political philosophy, penned a book about why he decided to work as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., he became a cause célèbre. Published in 2009, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” attested to the contentment that can be derived from working with one’s hands instead of doing “knowledge” work. 

Juan Ignacio Llana/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Students at a vocational school in Bilbao, Spain, do hands-on work in a robotics and automation workshop.

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” he writes. “They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

Mentxaka can relate to the gratification. He liked working as a computer consultant. He would have happily continued to do it, but he couldn’t find a way to sustain a career in the industry. Today he says he derives unexpected pleasure from his new vocation. At school they’ve learned how to make electronic switchboards and combine them with programming languages, sensors, motors, and robotic arms – skills he is using at the software company where he’s apprenticing. “It is like a game but for grown-ups,” he says. 

While in the depths of joblessness, he says, he started to understand how people can complain about immigrants getting jobs when citizens can’t find work. Then he said he had a revelation: “You wake up – you realize you [can either] stay behind or you can go ahead.”

The best hope is that all displaced workers can chart a similar path. One major test is under way in the French provincial town of Amiens, a former industrial city about an hour north of Paris. Here, a Whirlpool factory announced it was relocating to Poland, a classic example of outsourcing that became a flashpoint in the recent French presidential election.

Newly elected President Emmanuel Macron, a pro-globalization, pro-EU centrist who was born in Amiens, had been panned by workers during his campaign for not visiting the factory. He finally did, after making it to Round 2 of the race. On the day he showed up, though, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen upstaged him by rallying workers in the parking lot. 

Mr. Macron has said he’ll focus on retraining industrial workers who lose their jobs. In a place like Amiens, where manufacturing accounts for just 13 percent of the economy, his supporters say his vision of a postindustrial future makes sense. “Macron thinks about globalization with a realistic view,” says Olivier Williame, a local teacher. “He says we should try to [retrain] the employees losing the jobs, rather than trying to save absolutely these jobs when the plants are closing.”

The message has not convinced union worker Frederic Chanterelle. “Globalization means always more for the strong and less for the weak,” he said on a recent day as workers streamed in and out of the factory on a shift change. 

“The people are going to rise up one day,” he added angrily.

Searching for solutions for such workers lies at the heart of what members of the Swedish “Future of Work” commission, such as Mr. Roine, grappled with. “These questions have been put forward many times in the past, even in the early stages of computerization, in the ’50s and ’60s,” says Roine. “Now a lot of people think this time is different because of different aspects of technological change. This means that quite a lot of people that previously did something will now have to retrain.”

But, he adds, retraining will have to be done in a smart way – a way that both reduces the earnings gap in societies and brings workers a sense of hope about the future. Otherwise, more people are going to be rising up – and not just in Amiens.

“If you think, as I do, that the free market economy is the way we should organize society ... we have to think about [the future] in ways that actually show that this system has something in it for everyone,” he says. “Otherwise there is a backlash lurking around the corner.”

In the race for safer ciphers, China just quantum-leap frogged the rest of the world.

Ever since Mesopotamian potters used codes to protect early trade secrets, a battle has raged between information guardians and those who would break that custody. Modern mathematical schemes rely on huge prime numbers to encrypt messages, but experts say this bulwark too will someday join its fallen forerunners.

Now, China aims to escape that contest entirely with the creation of a communication network not secured by math, but guaranteed by the fundamental rules of nature. A team has demonstrated mastery over the secret sauce behind such a “quantum internet” with their satellite Micius, which recently smashed the distance record for creating a bizarre link between light particles known as entanglement.

“They are years ahead of everyone else in this technology,” says Vadim Makarov, head of a quantum hacking lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who was not involved. “It’s absolutely awesome.”

Launched August 2016, the Micius satellite successfully entangled photons between two Chinese towns almost 750 miles apart. The experiment bested former fiber-optics setups by a factor of 10, a feat chief architect Jian-Wei Pan says others dismissed as “a crazy idea” when he first proposed it back in 2003. The accomplishment proves possible the ultimate aim of cryptography: an invincible code system theoretically capable of instantly connecting any two (or more) points on Earth. 

Protecting secrets with light

Quantum networks are in part built on the coupling of photons, or particles of light.

Entangled photons share a connection allowing an observer of one to indirectly infer the condition of its mate, just as seeing a heads-up penny lets you assume the other side shows tails. Photons too have randomly determined, opposing states. But unlike penny faces, photon pairs are free agents. Micius produces two streams of these partners, beaming each to a different lab, which could use that special connection to turn the random string of “heads and tails” into a shared secret key useful for encryption.

Any attempt to steal the code mid-stream would destroy that fragile connection, creating an obviously unsafe, error-riddled key, just as a third person eavesdropping on a two-way Skype call could slow down the video, alerting the speakers. But unlike the Skype disruption, which the eavesdropper could avoid with sneakier tools, ironclad physical laws forbid the quantum key from being intercepted and re-transmitted intact, and guaranteed keys mean unbreakable codes.  

Dr. Pan says the final design far exceeds his team’s early expectations, approaching functionality, but others suggest the fledgling network isn’t quite ready for secret swapping yet.

“This is a science experiment,” says Dr. Makarov. Few ground stations under the satellite’s path have the large telescopes needed to pick up the particles. And the signal is quite weak, with only one entangled photon pair in six million making the journey intact. Pan says upcoming papers will showcase additional techniques, which Makarov suspects will include faster key distribution.

And Micius isn't China's only foray into quantum cryptography. A 1,200-mile fiber optic network stretching from Beijing to Shanghai already shuttles useful quantum keys between hundreds of nodes. But light scatters as it moves through the cables, requiring new links every hundred kilometers that add weak spots to the chain. Micius represents a doubling down on quantum technology that could allow the nation to scale up the network in a big way. 

Tomorrow's encryption, needed today

While China is the undisputed leader in quantum cryptography, Canada is also pursuing a quantum satellite, expected to launch in four to five years. If other nations have similar programs, they are taking shape under wraps.

This pursuit reflects a near certainty in the cryptographic community that advanced computing will someday lay bare today’s sensitive information. Quantum computers would slice through the mathematics underpinning modern cryptography – and experts say it's more of a question of “when” than “if.”

Even if that “when” remains decades away, many believe intelligence agencies are thinking ahead. “All of today’s secrets are getting recorded, and in the future the NSA will read them. It’s a time bomb,” explains Makarov.

Researchers who can't afford satellites aim to shore up this weakness with a different technique called “post quantum” encryption, new math-based codes that are strong against both classical and quantum adversaries, but advocates say this approach takes time, too.

“It takes 10 to 20 years to properly deploy new crypto.... We still have many years of scrutiny to really build up confidence in their quantum resilience,” explains Michele Mosca, professor at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

A mission 'beneficial to all human beings'

But building those higher mathematical walls merely starts the next heat of the millennia-old cryptographic race, spurring a new generation of record-breaking ladders.

Which is why China aims to end the race entirely. Shepherding finicky photons from a satellite moving at 18,000 miles per hour through jostling air molecules to ground stations hundreds of miles below isn't the easiest way to pass a note, but the loophole-free physical guarantee proves irresistible.

“This is the sole reason why people do quantum cryptography,” says Makarov. “It is secure today. It is secure for all the future.”

But that safety isn’t quite the type election organizers and ransomware victims imagine, points out Dr. Mosca, who cautions against describing any network as “unhackable.” Current computers can’t crack modern encryption, but that doesn’t stop hackers from tricking users or exploiting software.

Rather, quantum cryptography safeguards against a catastrophic collapse of the core technology. “Imagine if the underlying mathematical algorithm gets broken. Then everything becomes unsecure. That will be an order of magnitude bigger problem,” explains Makarov.

And security is just the beginning. Future quantum networks will make possible applications we haven’t begun to imagine, deepening our understanding of and command over the smallest bits of our universe along the way, experts say.

To that end, Pan describes Micius as a pathfinder satellite with a twofold mission: to experiment with quantum communication and further quantum science in a way “beneficial to all human beings.”

Ramon Espinosa/AP

A man walks past a television set showing US President Trump signing the new Cuba policy, in a living room festooned with images of Cuban leaders at a house in Havana, Cuba, on Friday, June 16, 2017.

Like most Cubans’ apartments, Yanela Duran Noa’s four-bedroom went nearly unchanged for almost six decades. She didn’t have the income to upgrade the outdated fixtures or replace sagging furniture.

That changed last year, when the island saw an influx of US tourism. In 2012, Ms. Duran, had received government permission to rent one bedroom in her central Havana home; in 2016, she started booking through Airbnb, for $30 per night.

“The room was rented to capacity. Now, before a current month ends, the next month is already booked,” she says from her home, which overlooks a hodgepodge of dirty concrete buildings interspersed with freshly painted ones in shades of blue and green. She finally has the money to remodel three bathrooms and three bedrooms, and has plans to apply for permission to rent two more rooms.

Across Havana, cracks in intricately painted tile floors, crooked window panes eroded by decades of hurricane seasons, and bedroom fans that buzz as loudly as prop planes but barely circulate the air are all part of the allure for many Americans, who envision Cuba as a land stuck in time. That image helped draw more than 600,000 US tourists last year, after former President Barack Obama loosened individual travel restrictions.

But the uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s executive order last Friday has Cubans in and outside the tourism sector concerned about what’s next. The new rules aren’t a total rollback to pre-Obama restrictions, but will once again limit individual US travel to Cuba, and aim to clamp down on money going to the Cuban military, which runs most hotels on the island. And, in a diplomatic relationship better known for its animosity than trust, the move has symbolic importance: not only in US politics, but for Cuba’s own internal reforms, analysts say.

“Cuban tourism isn’t solely dependent on the US market, but it’s an increasingly important market,” says Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. Even so, the policy change still “has the potential to hurt people – the average people who rent a room or own a snack bar,” he says.

“You’re taking the sails out of a kind of momentum that was important for individual lives and had an important resonance in internal politics,” Dr. Bustamante says. “Cuba is in a delicate moment.”

Human rights debate

One of the central reasons cited in Mr. Trump’s change in US-Cuba policy has to do with human rights, with the president announcing in Miami on Friday that he would “expose the crimes of the Castro regime and stand with the Cuban people in their struggle for freedom.”

The government has a long track record of citizen repression, and critics of Obama’s rapprochement have pointed to the lack of improvement on political prisoners or press censorship since then as reasons to once again roll back US-citizen spending or business investment.

“The profits from investment and tourism flow directly to the military,” Trump said Friday. “The regime takes the money and owns the industry. The outcome of the last administration's executive action has only been more repression.”

Some analysts, however, argue that the rollback will do little to improve Cubans’ rights. José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division, argues that important changes in civil liberties and human rights took place in the lead-up to the diplomatic thaw and the subsequent two and a half years. This includes more space for human rights activists, academics, and bloggers to speak out and generate debate, he says.

“The unilateral sanctions over more than half a century imposed by Washington [have] been a total failure,” Mr. Vivanco said on a call with the Atlantic Council in the lead up to Trump’s announcement last week, calling it “highly unrealistic” to expect different results from Trump’s rollback.

Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a former Cuban ambassador and retired professor at the University of Havana, casts doubt on the administration’s human rights argument. Trump is catering to Cuban-Americans opposed to any interaction with the Castro government, he says, and human rights “are simply used for justifying” the change.

“The damage is going to be felt by Cubans more than the military, more than the government,” he says.

New opportunities

The diplomatic thaw hasn’t transformed the country. But it has provided an important influx of money – and opportunity – on the island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, many Cubans and analysts agree. And the timing was key: it provided a new lifeline to Cuba as the economy stuttered, and as it lost most help from a key benefactor, Venezuela, thanks to that country’s own economic and political crises.

President Raúl Castro took over from his brother, Fidel, in 2008, and attempted to revive the flailing economy through gradual reforms like allowing citizens to open their own businesses or buy and sell property. Today, there are an estimated 500,000 self-employed Cubans. Many work in tourism: setting up restaurants in their homes, driving tourists around town in their decades-old cars, or acting as translators or tour guides.

Loosened US restrictions “helped some of the changes already in place [in Cuba’s economy] to a new degree,” Bustamante says.

Duran says it’s not just the rental-room income that has benefitted her family, but the relationships she’s made with visitors, most of whom are from the United States.

“Tourism in Cuba [today] is very different than years past,” which she felt was defined by foreigners seeking prostitutes or drugs, she says. “Today, tourists are here because they want to know Cuba. They want to know firsthand what is happening here,” she says.

Airbnb will remain a presence on the island, where roughly 22,000 properties are currently listed. As of April 2015, some $40 million has been paid to Cubans renting their homes.

But even outside the tourism sector, the increase in visitors has made a small but palpable difference. Walking through the candy-colored building-flanked streets of Havana’s center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, social communications graduate Katia Morfa says she thinks that the two-year thaw may not have delivered on Cubans’ high expectations, but that “turning back will only harm citizens.”

“The image of [Havana] has changed, the private sector is changing, and that means individual growth,” Ms. Morfa says. “[These are] developments that were strengthened by the thaw.”

Time of transition

It matters when it comes to internal politics as well, analysts say.

“To the extent that there are better international relations, more rapprochement, and normality with the US, the more possibility there is that those who want to see change in Cuba will have more opportunity to come into power,” says human rights activist Miriam Luisa Leiva Viamonte, who previously worked for the Ministry of Exterior Relations.

Mr. Castro has announced plans to step down as head of state in 2018, and the current first vice president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is considered a likely successor. Economically, it is also a time of change. Cuba’s gross domestic product shrank by about one percent last year, and the country is trying to make significant reforms, like changing its dual-currency system.

“It’s a delicate process of transition,” says Bustamante, noting divides in the government between those who embrace further economic reforms and those who don’t. Against that backdrop, any US changes Havana can interpret as “hostile” may affect Cuba’s “domestic process in a way that doesn’t serve the kind of ... gradual but sustained road to real reform that most Cubans would like to see.” 

Reuters

A Franciscan monk stands near United Nations peacekeeping soldiers and an armored personnel carrier near the village of Ndim, Central African Republic, April 26.

One of Africa’s worst conflicts may have finally ended through a rare type of diplomacy. On June 19, more than a dozen armed groups in the Central African Republic signed a peace accord. Yet they did not do so through an official negotiator. Rather a religious group in Italy used what it calls a “spiritually inspired” method – building empathy and compassion – to help forge a truce.

This diplomatic feat was achieved by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Roman Catholic lay group that works quietly and discreetly around the world to end conflicts. It puts prayer at the heart of its mediation. Its efforts have been so successful that the United Nations formally signed an agreement on June 9 to cooperate with Sant’Egidio in ending other conflicts. Its president, Marco Impagliazzo, says the group’s success lies in being seen as a neutral party that relies on patience and shared values to create trust between foes.

A Dutch scholar, Gerrie ter Haar, explains such faith-based diplomacy: “Bringing the spiritual dimension into the peacemaking process can create access to the more deep-seated, affective base of the parties’ behavior, enabling them to examine critically their own attitudes and actions.”

The conflict in the Central African Republic erupted in 2013 when the mainly Muslim Seleka rebels took power, triggering violent reprisals by militia groups that are nominally Christian. As many as 6,000 people have died. From the start, however, local religious leaders – Islamic, Catholic, and Protestant – played a key part in protecting civilians and initiating talks. They described their “weapons” as “prayer and dialogue.”

As fears of genocide grew, however, the UN, France, and the African Union sent in troops to quell the fighting. This allowed the election of a new president last year, although his influence barely extends beyond the capital. When fighting erupted again in May and more than 100,000 people had to flee, Sant’Egidio was able to bring 13 rebel groups to Rome for talks and reach a deal.

Many details of the pact still need to be implemented. And victims of the violence await the establishment of a commission to document the atrocities and achieve a level of justice and social reconciliation.

But the country, which is one of the poorest in Africa, is now rebuilding. And that is due in part to a type of conflict resolution that uses spiritual qualities to transcend divisions and end wars.