An attack on democracy

Abstract

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 6 Volume 21 Issue 4 2014 Any government that deprives its citizens of the right to strike should reconsider calling itself democratic is now used against pickets or trade unionists informing other workers about an on-going strike. Based on this article, some recent, threatening sentences aiming at discouraging workers from mobilising have already seen the light. Thirdly a new corpus of hardcore administrative sanctions is being created, cynically baptised as ‘Public Safety Law’ that will dramatically curb the right to protest and strike by, for example, allowing police to impose brutal fines (over euro 600,000) for organising or participating in these demonstrations. These administrative fines make it unnecessary to bring the defendant to court and hence deprive her or him of the legitimate right of being assisted by a lawyer or being heard by a judge. Forty years have passed since people in Spain got their right to strike and demonstrate. Many took these rights for granted. Now it seems we might have been wrong. Today, Spain is re-joining a shameful blacklist of countries where the criminalisation of trade union rights is a reality: Guatemala, Algeria, Belarus, South Korea, Greece, Honduras, and Colombia, among others. CCOO and UGT have joined civil society in a nation-wide campaign against the attempts to criminalise the right to strike and other trade union activities. The campaign states clearly ‘Striking is not a Crime’, la huelga no es delito, and has an action plan with information, mobilisation , lobbying, and denouncing these policies at national and international level, in order to stop the government’s plan and defending clearly that the right to strike, freedom of association, and union practices cannot be criminalised. Both organisations maintain, in accordance with the fundamental conventions of the International Labour Organisation (‘ILO’), that the right of workers to strike is a human right and that it cannot be denied. Yet, in Spain, as in other countries, the conservative government has used the economic and financial crisis to sanctify the so-called reforms in order to impose a new order and unbalance the equilibrium between workers and employers. UGT and CCOO have argued that Spain will definitively not get out of the crisis by reducing or criminalising the right to strike, nor by undermining or destroying collective bargaining, nor by downgrading workers’ and trade union rights. But three years into Mr Rajoy’s government it is more than evident that these policies have had a major impact on social inequality in Spain, which is in line with the expectations of the trade unions. Since the very beginning of the crisis, the government and certain media have driven a hardhitting campaign against trade unions, questioning their ‘old-fashioned points of view’, their T here are numerous statistics that demonstrate that Spanish workers and society are increasingly mobilising in recent years against the austerity measures imposed by the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and other authorities. Some of these figures claim that only in the city of Madrid more than 4000 demonstrations took place in 2013. Austerity is not the only reason although every single legislative initiative produced by the national government includes references to the economy . A good but sinister example is the preface to the Draft for the reform of the right to legally interrupt pregnancy, commonly known as abortion law, which includes a sinister reference to the positive effects of forbidding Spanish women to decide on their own body and mind on the national economy. It is fair to say that the reforms on Education, Immigration, Culture, Health, Abortion and Work have little to do with money or economy and much about ideology, and they achieved to bring Spanish people to the streets daily, demonstrating against the measures that trade unions foresaw when Mr Rajoy took office. Today, at the end of 2014, nearly forty years after democracy was introduced in Spain, about two hundred and fifty trade unionists are facing the possibility of being sentenced to more than 120 years in prison for participating in demonstrations or industrial actions. One of the most shocking cases is the so-called Airbus Case. Eight union members of the two big Spanish...