Unions Call for General Strike in Andalusia, Spain

The Unión de Sindicatos de Trabajadoras y Trabajadores en Andalucía (Ustea), the Confederación General del Trabajo de Andalucía (CGT) and the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores called for a general strike in the public services of that Spanish autonomous community this Thursday, October 28.

Among the objectives of the protest is to demand stability in the occupation of interim and temporary staff in public administrations.

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The regional call is a sign of protest against the "lukewarm and passive policy of all governments against the precariousness and abuse of their public workers," announced the Ustea in a statement.

The document pointed out that several European judgments "have condemned the continuous neglect and mistreatment that have led to an approximate 30 percent temporality in the public sector, even higher than the temporality in the private sector."

In the opinion of the conveners, the few agreements reached do not solve the problems in this regard, but continue to harm those affected.

In this sense, they criticized that the draft law of urgent measures to reduce the temporality of public employment does not observe what was raised by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its judgment in March 2020, in which it points out that Spain abuses workers through successive staff contracts of an interim nature.

The mobilizing organizations assure that the bill does not solve the problem and will aggravate it even more, "since it penalizes the workers in abuse of temporality with forced dismissal and with compensations that would mean the bankruptcy of the local and autonomic administrations."

For its part, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) supports the general strike in the public sector. "For us this is not a supervening strike, it does not escape us that the struggle for the stability of the collective of interim workers has been constant for years," they said in a statement.

In a statement, the union points out that "the abuse of temporariness has placed hundreds of thousands of public employees in a situation of fraud of law."

They added that redressing the abuse of temporality and the problem they have in Education with the access system are two different issues.

"Redressing the fraud of law, achieving a fairer access system and reversing the grievances caused to Public Education, are goods for all, never privileges for a few," they pointed out.