News

The nationwide action planned for today, July 19, is the next step in a mobilisation campaign launched by the Spanish trade union federations CCOO and UGT and a riposte to the austerity plans introduced by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy earlier this month. The Spanish trade unionists have made it clear that they will not bend and today’s action will be the first of a new wave of protest.

Philip Jennings, UNI Global Union General Secretary said, “Rajoy talks about getting the unemployed back to work while introducing measures designed to strip them of their dignity. He is dismantling the welfare state, destroying collective bargaining and giving the final rites to social dialogue. We saw what happened when the Galician miners took a stand in Madrid last week and we will see it again. Spain’s social fabric is being ripped apart by a bloody-minded insistence on austerity measures which don’t work.”

Some of the measures introduced by Prime Minister Rajoy include a cut in unemployment benefits; cuts in the public pension system forcing pensioners to pay for medicines which were free; a reduction in social benefits for those taking care of dependant relatives; rises in VAT and the cost of energy; and further cuts in the earnings of civil servants.

These measures come on the heels of labour reforms which have attacked collective bargaining, reduced workers’ rights and made firing even easier. All of which has made the spectre of six million unemployed by the end of the year an inevitability unless there is an immediate change of course.