The general secretary of UGT, Pepe Álvarez, accused this Wednesday the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, of issuing warnings against trade union organizations because of the call for a general strike on next 11 November, stressing that UGT has no “fear” of their messages.
“To me it sounded like a threat,” Álvarez said during the opening of the events “Trade union action of the future, now,” referring to Feijóo’s words at an information breakfast this Tuesday, where he urged unions to rethink the strike after the train accident in Urda (Toledo) and warned that, if they proceed, “they will attach their image to Pedro Sánchez forever.”
The UGT leader also referred to statements by Abascal, who said this Tuesday that CCOO and UGT would have to suspend the strike and that, if they finally do not, “he will take note” in the event of “a change of cycle” after the elections of 29 November.
“But what happens? That now we are going to be afraid? Now they think that because they say this we are going to stop doing what we have to do?” Álvarez reproached, recalling that UGT has 138 years of history and has gone through “dictatorships, wars” without renouncing its initials.
The general secretary of UGT emphasized that the general strike is driven by specific demands and not by a whimsical decision by the trade union centers, rejecting criticism from those who question that eight years of government have been waited before pushing a protest of this scale.
Strike for housing
“General strikes do not arise because someone wants them to arise, because yes. There have to be a whole series of conditions that have to be met,” he explained, before citing some measures approved in this legislature that, in his view, by themselves would not justify a strike, such as the conversion of four million temporary contracts into permanent ones or the pension reform agreed in 2021.
However, he placed the trigger for the call in the parliamentary rejection of two government Royal Decree-Laws on housing, after the case of Maricarmen, a 87-year-old woman evicted from the house where she had lived as a tenant for seven decades, unleashed a wave of protests across the country.
Álvarez has indicated that this episode showed the seriousness of the housing problem in Spain and has censured that the parliamentary groups overturned the proposals of the Executive, which led the trade union organizations to take the step of calling the general strike".
In addition, he has called for a major state pact that reserves at least 1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the construction of protected housing.
Along the same lines, he has argued that the mobilization also responds to the absence of dialogue with the employers' organization CEOE, which he has accused of refusing to sit down and negotiate the agreement for employment and collective bargaining (AENC).
Likewise, Álvarez has challenged the CEOE president, Antonio Garamendi, to make public the messages of the WhatsApp group in which representatives of the unions and the employers' organization participate, to show that, as he argues, it has been the employers' organization that has avoided meetings.
"There have been no meetings because they did not want to meet, because they do not want to negotiate the collective agreements, because they do not want to reduce working hours, because they do not want to talk about housing," he said.
The union leader added that the strike must serve to put at the center of political debate issues such as pensions and sick leave, especially in light of the proximity of the elections.
Álvarez has reiterated that the general strike has to be "very widespread" and has expressed his confidence that the mobilizations will fill squares and streets across the country. "On the 12th they are going to have to bow their heads and they are going to have to know that they will have to talk with us," he said, defending that the call must open the door to broad negotiations on all these issues.