MADRID—Spain’s first nationwide general strike in 14 years brought workers, tenants, students, and pensioners into the streets on Nov. 11. A day of picket lines ended with massive afternoon demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Málaga, and dozens of other cities, despite foul weather.
The 24-hour walkout was called by Spain’s two largest labor federations, the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and the General Union of Workers (UGT), together with tenants’ unions and smaller labor groups, including the CGT and CNT. Its slogan was simple: “Wages, housing, prices.”
For many Spanish workers, those three words describe a squeeze that has become unbearable. The progressive coalition government led by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has raised the minimum wage and pensions, but soaring rents and home prices have eaten away the gains. The unions are demanding general raises of 4% to 7%, a minimum wage increase of at least 7% in 2027, price controls, and full enforcement of Spain’s Right to Housing Law.
Anger had been building since late September, when the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who later died, set off protests and youth encampments in public squares such as Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. On Oct. 2, the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox voted down the government’s emergency housing decrees. Sánchez responded by calling a snap general election for Nov. 29.
For the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), the strike was about the future both on the job and at the ballot box. Writing in the party’s newspaper, Mundo Obrero, days before the walkout, PCE General Secretary Enrique Santiago warned that “a possible government of the radical right and extreme right in Spain is not a mere hypothesis.”
He accused the PP of dropping any firewall against Vox and of joining Vox in a drive to dismantle public pensions and services. Gains like labor reform, higher wages and pensions, and intervention in the electricity market, he wrote, were won through the struggle of the left and the unions.
After the strike, Santiago, who is running in Seville on the ticket of the left coalition Frente Amplio, called the day “an intergenerational success.” He said union contracts should include measures guaranteeing access to housing, which he called a constitutional right.
CCOO leader Unai Sordo told union delegates gathered in Madrid’s Plaza de Cibeles that no government could ignore workers with average incomes who can no longer afford rent or a mortgage. Rejecting right-wing claims that the strike was an election stunt, he said: “We are not a political party, and we do not take orders from anyone.”
The day was marred by police charges and pepper spray against picket lines at Madrid’s Mercamadrid wholesale market and elsewhere. At Mercamálaga, in Málaga, Ernesto Alba, general secretary of the Communist Party of Andalusia and a regional lawmaker, was reportedly assaulted.
“Demonstrations and picket lines are not crimes,” Santiago said. CCOO and UGT announced legal action, with Sordo declaring that “there is no democratic society without a democratic police force.”
Raquel Arranz Parejo, general secretary of the Union of Communist Youth of Spain, argued in Mundo Obrero that the strike was “deeply political” but only one step in building working-class power. “Neither the encampments nor the strike itself are the end,” she wrote, “but one of the parts that must turn the gears.”
The official election campaign begins Nov. 13.
This article includes material from multiple reports in Mundo Obrero (Workers World), newspaper of the Communist Party of Spain.
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