14 years later, with Parliament dissolved and the call for elections on November 29 on the table, the communist-affiliated Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO.) and the socialist-affiliated Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) have announced a 24-hour general strike this autumn to “demand decent wages to access decent housing.”
It is the first general strike they have called during the “Sánchez era,” and they are doing so on the exact same day that elections were called for November 29. In doing so, they seem to adopt the mental framework of the acting prime minister, who, upon calling elections, criticized the “usual speculators” who “want to destroy our children’s future.”
UGT General Secretary Pepe Álvarez ruled out on Monday that the general strike would coincide with the election campaign. Therefore, it will take place before November 13, and the specific date will be discussed with the Tenants’ Union (Sindicato de Inquilinas)—organizer of the Sol encampment and the true driving force behind this general strike. The Tenants’ Union had already called for it last Friday when Parliament rejected the two Royal Decree-Laws that the government had published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) to respond to social pressure demanding urgent solutions. Solutions that remain impossible as long as Spain builds fewer than 100,000 homes per year when new household creation is estimated at at least 250,000 annually—without it being clear how the arrival of more than 400,000 irregular immigrants each year since the beginning of this decade affects the situation.
The leader of Comisiones Obreras, Unai Sordo, assures that his union will “continue with an itinerary of mobilization” and “tension on the streets” in the coming months until the general election on November 29—a call he attributes to the “blockade” in the Congress of Deputies.
Sordo emphasized that the strike “is not just about housing,” but also about driving a wage increase at a time when negotiations with the CEOE employers’ association are stalled: “Housing is eating up half the wages of many families,” he added.
Indeed, the recently re-elected president of the CEOE employers’ association, Antonio Garamendi, warned days ago that in Spain a general strike is envisioned as a labor protest tool and is not permissible as a “political strike.” He thus questioned the legality of this call because, in his view, “it does not fall within a labor dispute.”
