El Mundo headlines today: “The transport strike is overwhelming the government and putting the country’s supply chain in check”. “The government no longer supports the right to strike and calls the transport workers ‘radicals'”, underlines El Español. “The socialist law of pickets turns against the government in the radical transport strike” recalls the digital newspaper Vozpopuli.com…
ArcelorMittal and Azucarera have decided to stop production. The dairy, steel and fishing industries are operating at half throttle. And the shortage of products is beginning to be noticed on supermarket shelves, while violent pickets register more than 80 assaults per hour, according to figures provided by the Executive to distribution companies. The employers’ association CEOE warns that the violence in the freight transport strike is breaking the entire distribution chain in many sectors of the economy.
The government describes the strike as ‘a boycott encouraged by the far right’, and Transport Minister Raquel Sánchez says ‘I am not going to sit down with a group of radicals who are acting violently’. So the government has decided to mobilise almost 24,000 agents of the state security forces to “act forcefully” and try to put an end to the “violence”.
The problem is that “Pedro Sánchez’s government, which is calling out the violence of the pickets in the freight transport strike and promises strong measures, decriminalised the coercion and violent actions of the pickets less than a year ago” as the digital newspaper Vozpopuli.com reminds us.
