CANARIAN UNIONS MARK WORKERS' DAY

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Saturday May 1 2010

TRADE unions marched through Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz to mark International Workers' Day on Saturday.

by JAMES TWEEDIE

In the first demonstration of the day, some 1,000 members of the Intersyndical Canaria (IC) regional trade union federation demand a halt to changes to labour laws which they say would undermine job security.

Marchers chanted: "These reforms will sack us" and "Paulino and Zapatero to the dole queue", in reference to Canarian Coalition regional president Paulino Rivero and Socialist Party prime minister José Luis Zapatero.

Santa Cruz was decked out for its May festival as the protesters made their way from García Sanabria park to the dockside Plaza España, the seat of Tenerife's Cabildo government.

Walls and lamp-posts had been defaced with a worrying proliferation of far-right propaganda stickers from the Falange Española faction of the original fascist movement of dictator General Franco, but members of the union tore them down.

IC leaders also called for a general strike against public service cuts by the national and regional governments, and for “decolonisation and independence” for the Canaries.

The seven Canary Islands are economically underdeveloped, with an unemployment rate of around 30 per cent. While the overwhelming majority of the population are ethnic Spaniards, the African archipelago lies half-way between Spain and Latin America, culturally as well as geographically.

There are eight national and regional trade union federations active in the Canaries. At least two other Workers' Day marches were held in Santa Cruz on the same day, one by the large national Workers' Commissions (CCOO) and another by the smaller anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Workers (CNT).

Yet with no apparent irony one IC banner read: "Unity is Strength."

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