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Last March, companies and self-employed workers in the transport sector protested against the government by blocking roads and preventing access to ports or industrial parks with the aim of slowing down activity. In the last few days, Spain has witnessed the call for the second transport strike so far this year. In this way, the list of social mobilizations that put the current coalition government in the spotlight expands. In this case, it would be a strike mobilized by the National Platform in Defense of Road Transport (in Spanish: Plataforma Nacional en Defensa del Transporte por Carretera), composed mostly by self-employed and that does not have a formal representation in the bodies of interlocution available to the Government. The workers see how the loading companies do not comply with the agreed prices, making it impossible for the self-employed to meet the increase in costs. The strikers denounce, not only the passivity of the Ministry of Transport before the breach of these, but also the obstruction that this has exercised with the complaints of the Civil Guard in this situation. Therefore, the platform has called for an indefinite stoppage from Sunday, November 13, a key date considering that the country is on the verge of Christmas, the time of greatest consumption and commercial activity of the year. This is how, once again, the negligence and the mismatches of the public administration increase the burden that the self-employed have to bear to make ends meet, causing the closure of more than 200 companies in Spain every month.
One more evidence of the socialist failure with the workers.
The two big unions in the country, closely linked to the Socialist Party, currently in government, and which should look after the interests of the workers, have not joined the protest, justifying themselves on the grounds that the workers who have called for the mobilization lack legal coverage to organize picket lines. Meanwhile, the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez Jiménez, together with the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, have called for “responsibility” on the part of the strikers who will exercise their protest in the face of the adversities they face caused by the public administration itself. In the case of the minister, she considers that there are no causes for demonstrating and calling a strike that would harm the sector. In this sense, she begged the strikers to let those who wished to do so to work and not to join the mobilization. “Solidaridad” Union, on the other hand, has shown support for the road workers’ platforms this past October 31, confronting the Ministry of Transport and showing solidarity with the sector.
With this mobilization, the disconnection of the left with the working class is once again evident. In recent years, Spain has witnessed how the Socialist government has sacrificed the interests of the workers in favor of its consolidation in power. The trade union organizations that orbit around the PSOE have turned their backs on the real problems of key sectors in the Spanish economic system, such as the transport workers. Cases of corruption with the destination of public funds, inefficiency of the Spanish public administration when it comes to exercising the law or political pacts in favor of personal interests and against the interests of workers throughout Spain: links in the same chain that widen the gap between socialist politicians and the political space of the workers. The negligence demonstrated by the public administration in this case is one more consequence of the course that the PSOE took long ago, leaving the workers waiting for another political alternative that defends their interests to occupy administrative posts.