Spain

The Spanish miners need your help!

The Spanish miners’ strike against a cut in the subsidy to the industry is now in its tenth week. Support in Spain and internationally is growing all the time. When the miners’ march (the “Black March” or “Marcha Negra”) from the coalmining regions to Madrid reached the capital on 19 July they were greeted by thousands of supporters and well-wishers in a clear demonstration that their strike is now seen as the spearhead against the government’s austerity policies. In a reference to Spain’s all-conquering national football team sections of the crowd were heard chanting “This is our national...

Solidarity with Spanish miners!

Up to 100 billion euros for bankers and nothing for the workers! Sounds familiar? Yes it’s the turn of Spanish bankers to receive a massive handout from the Eurocrats in Brussels. It should come as a surprise to no-one that not a single euro will go towards helping the Spanish workers who now face the highest unemployment rates in Europe and vicious cuts in welfare and social spending. Spanish miners, as of 9 July in their sixth week of indefinite strike against the withdrawal of substantial subsidies to their industry, will certainly not expecting even a tiny percentage of these staggering...

Spanish miners are striking for us all

After a serious of localised industrial actions, Spanish coal miners, in the main mining regions of Asturias and Castile and León, went on indefinite strike on 29 May. This is their response to the announcement by the right wing government of Mariano Rajoy that subsidies to the coal mining regions will be massively cut, in effect announcing his intention to close down the industry. The cuts mean the end of the remaining 8,000 miners’ jobs, with another 30,000 jobs affected indirectly. Many of the mining communities, particularly in the mountainous border region between Asturias and Castile and...

The Spanish miners' labour war

On Monday 18 June tens of thousands of people marched through the northern Spanish towns of Léon and Langrero in solidarity with the month long miners’ strike. The marches were organised for a one-day general strike in the Austurias region. The miners’ strike, over a 64% cut in government subsidies to the industry, is spreading and become a highly-charged regional class struggle. There have been clashes with police; miners have set up road and rail blocks and attacked the offices of the national ruling party. Teachers, transport workers, and shipbuilders have also been in strike in the area...

Solidarity with Spanish miners!

Spanish coal miners, located mainly in the northern region of Asturias, went on indefinite strike against the austerity measures of Spanish prime Minister Mariano Rajoy at the end of May. Fuelled by massive property speculation — a bubble which has now well and truly burst — the dictates of the IMF and the deteriorating capitalist crisis, the Spanish economy nosedived into recession in the second half of 2008 and since then millions of jobs have been lost. With 30 billion euros of cuts, as well as huge tax increases, Spain also now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU. The...

Spain's bailout won't cure euro crisis

The Spanish government announced on Saturday 9 June that it would seek a financial bailout from the European Union. Previously, for months, it had said that it had everything under control and there was no question of a bailout. Eurozone finance ministers quickly said they’d lend up to 100 billion euros to the Spanish government to enable it to patch up dodgy banks. Although Spain’s budget-balance record was better than Germany’s before 2007, and Spain’s bank regulation was applauded in 2008 as exceptionally good, Spanish banks have eventually been brought down by the collapse of real-estate...

Why Spain is spiralling

Spain is on the brink of an economic crash and bail-out because of the perversities of the eurozone banking system and the world financial markets. The answer is to take high finance across Europe into public ownership, establish workers’ control over the sector, and run it as a public service for banking, pensions, and insurance. But the EU leaders will not do anything like that. The crisis will worsen. Spain had a property-price boom in the run-up to the 2007-8 crash, like the USA and Britain and Ireland. At first its property prices fell much more slowly than prices in the USA (now down 33%...

European news in brief

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union had its vote drop by 8% in provincial elections on 13 May in Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen. The SPD (equivalent of the Labour Party) gained 5%, and the SPD/Green coalition in Nordrhein-Westfalen now has a majority where before the election it was a minority government. The maverick Pirate Party went up from 2% to 8%, and, maybe in part as a result, the leftish party Die Linke went down from 6% to 3%. This result will increase the pressure on Merkel to modify the EU’s hard-neoliberal policy by adding in some “growth initiatives”...

Spain pushes “pay for health care”

Spain’s new conservative government is planning to change Spain’s health service so that the sick will have to pay a fee for medical examinations, doctors’ visits and prescriptions. Health care in Spain is currently free at the point of need, as in Britain’s NHS. Already (on 14 March) Catalonia has legislated a one-euro fee for prescriptions, on top of a means-tested requirement to pay up to 40% of the cost of medications. Britain’s Health and Social Care Act (passed on 20 March) points in the same direction. By thoroughly “marketising” health provision, it makes the introduction of fees for...

General strikes in Spain and Portugal

Spain’s two main union confederations, UGT and CCOO, called a one-day general strike on 29 March over issues similar to those sparking the strike wave in Italy. In a country with 23% unemployment, the new conservative government wants to change the law to make it easier for employers to sack workers. The executives of UGT and CCOO met jointly, for the first time in history, on 9 March, to decide to call the strike. The government’s proposals weaken collective bargaining by giving precedence to company-level agreements; allow employers to unilaterally reduce wages or change working hours and...

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