Workers in Southern Europe Synchronize Anti-Austerity Strikes

Spain’s heavy industry and large parts of the transportation network were disrupted early on Wednesday by the second general strike since the Popular Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy came to power last December.

The Spanish strike was called by unions after Mr. Rajoy presented a tough austerity budget for next year but it also comes after the country’s jobless rate recently reached a record 25 percent. Portugal faces a similar situation of soaring unemployment and budget cuts to comply with the terms of a $100 billion bailout agreement reached last year with international creditors.

Early on Wednesday, Spanish police reported that 32 people had been arrested and 15 injured – including five policemen — during violence on picket lines across the country but the government said the strike had so far not led to major disturbances. Many shops, banks and retailers were open for business.

While about 700 flights in and out of Spain were canceled Wednesday, Madrid and other airports were still functioning. The strike coincided with growing uncertainty about the future of Iberia, the national airline, after management announced this month that the airline needed to lay off a quarter of its workers to survive.

Ignacio Fernández Toxo, the head of one of Spain’s two main unions, Comisiones Obreras, said that the coordinated strike action across the Iberian Peninsula, as well as work stoppages in other parts of Europe, amounted to “a historic moment in the European Union movement.”

However, support for trade unions has dwindled in recent years because of their failure to prevent the surge in unemployment and controversy surrounding the unions’ reliance on government subsidies rather than contributions from members. In Spain, only about 16 percent of workers are unionized.

In fact, the strike could be overshadowed by protests in Madrid and other cities scheduled for late afternoon.

“I can afford to protest but not to lose a day of pay,” said Carlos Sánchez, a mechanic at Disancar, a small Madrid garage. “Striking at this stage in the crisis brings absolutely nothing to the workers.”

Still, the strike severely disrupted production across the Spanish automotive sector, with workers staying away from factories owned by Nissan, Volkswagen and other carmakers.

In Italy, civil servants went on strike and national transportation workers – although not airlines — called for a four-hour halt on Wednesday afternoon. Students demonstrated throughout the country, with rallies in Turin and Rome.

In Greece, the scene of the most violent social unrest in Europe since the start of the debt crisis, unions called a three-hour work stoppage starting at noon.

Union workers elsewhere also staged a number of protests and stoppages as a show of solidarity with their southern European counterparts.

A walkout by Belgian rail workers severely disrupted services on the country’s Thalys high-speed rail line and halted all its connections to Germany, the rail company said Wednesday.

More than 130 demonstrations were planned across France, with two of the country’s biggest unions — the Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT, and the Confédération Française Democratique du Travail, or CFDT — organizing a joint march through the streets of Paris, the first such protests since President François Hollande took office in May.

In a joint statement, five leading French unions expressed their “strong opposition to these austerity measures that are plunging Europe into economic stagnation and recession” and “threaten the European social model.”

Spanish unions disagreed with the government and employers over the impact of the strike Wednesday morning. While Mr. Toxo and other union leaders called the strike a success, Juan Rosell, the chairman of the main employers’ organization said that the walkouts appeared to be “not very important” and most likely less disruptive of the last general strike in March, based on electricity data and other early indicators. Red Eléctrica, operator of the national electricity grid, said that consumption was down 18.6 percent at 8 a.m. compared to a normal working day.

Nonetheless, Mr. Rosell called the decision to strike “a torpedo against recovery.”

Indeed, it comes as Mr. Rajoy is struggling to convince investors that Madrid will not require further European rescue funding and will meet budget deficit targets agreed with its European counterparts, in spite of a deepening recession.

In Valencia, a group of strikers tried to block access to the main office of Bankia, a giant lender that the government was forced to nationalize last May because of bad loans, triggering a crisis that forced Madrid to request more than $100 billion in European bailout funds a month later. More recently, banks provoked a public outcry over the evictions of families unable to meet mortgage payments.

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome, Nicola Clark from Paris, and Niki Kitsantonis from Athens.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/europe/workers-in-southern-europe-synchronize-anti-austerity-strikes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss