Today I didn’t have class, but in theory, I could have gone in to help out with some minor administrative tasks. I elected not to, however, in honor of the general strike called by la Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) to protest the labor reform proposed by the Zapatero administration.
The pamphlets distributed by the Comité of my school outlined the following reasons (and I quote):
The labor reform
- facilitates and reduces the cost of sacking staff, the ‘express’ route of firing workers with a shorter length of service, or redundancy for ‘economic, technical, organisational or production’ causes
- increases employers’ capacity to make staff redundant on the basis of a simple forecast of a ‘negative evolution’ in business without having to prove real and current difficulties
- reduces redundancy pay for those on permanent contracts and uses public funds to subsidise private sector companies’ redundancy payment obligations
- perpetuates temporary contracts as the entrance into the labor market–in August 2010, 93.5% of new contracts were temporary contracts!
- exacerbates the practice of substituting longer-serving staff with new staff on worse conditions, wages and rights. Places under threat of extinction the current permanent contracts with the right to 45 days pay per year redundancy pay, replaced by the new contract based on 33 days pay per year served
- gives more power to employers to unilaterally fix working conditions (working week, wages, holidays) and to opt out of collective agreements.
They go on to note that the “‘no reglada’” (i.e. private) education sector, employers “want a total deregulation of our sector, with minimal cost of organising their workforce and as little consideration as possible for work-life balance, human resources management and health and safety protection.”
Furthermore, according to CC.OO:
The origins of the crisis are NOT the system of labour relations, and to worsen them with the current labour reform is not a solution to the crisis, rather an attack on workers’ rights. In 2009, in full flight of recession, 13 million temporary contracts were registered, employers encountered no problems in making staff redundant and unemployment rose to four and a half million.
In Spain the crisis has its origins in the economic model, based on:
- an artificial property boom, whose collapse led to a rapid rise in unemployment
- the creation of low cost, low qualified, insecure employment based on temporary contracts
- lack of investment of profits back into research and development and staff training
- absence of controls of the finance system
Now, having allocated billions of euros to rescue the banks, those banks refuse to return that public money. Instead they demand cuts to public spending to reduce the national debt backed up with threats of financial instability for the country.
[...] We, the citizens of this country have the legitimate right to determine government policy, not market speculators, debt credit rating agencies nor investment bankers.
Support the GENERAL STRIKE to demand a change in government policy and in defence of our democracy.”
In addition to UGT and CC.OO, the main education unions in Spain (FECCO, FETE-UGT and STE) have joined the call for a strike today, according to a story posted at barcelonareporter.com.
The media have gone into overdrive trying to downplay strike participation and playing up the idea that the strike is a pointless, unnecessary and downright harmful gesture which will have no effect on the government’s policy.
That may be the case–just as it may be true that the strike has arrived tarde y mal (“late and badly”). Nevertheless, given the choice between joining in the pointless gesture of taking my disapproval to the streets with thousands of others or sitting around complaining about the same old shit as always or worse, well, I’ll take the first option.
