Petition Launched Against Labour Reform Ahead Of General Strike

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Thursday September 23 2010

Activists launched a petition against the government's new labour reform act in Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz on Thursday.

By James Tweedie

Campaigners gathered in front of the famous Flower Clock in García Sanabria park for the press conference to launch the Citizen's Manifesto, backed by a wide range of trade unions, residents' associations and the United Left party.

A hand-painted banner read: “No To The Labour Reform – General Strike!”

Spain's Socialist Party government faces a national general strike over the legislation on Wednesday September 29, coinciding with similar actions against EU-imposed austerity measures in other European countries.

The labour reform law, passed by parliament on September 9, makes it easier for employers to make staff redundant or to sack them for absenteeism.

Under the legislation statutory redundancy pay has been reduced from 45 days' wages per year of service to 33 days, or even as low as 20 days if the company can show “current or future losses or that there is a consistent reduction in its levels of income.”

Bosses can now also legally fire employees for taking two weeks off sick in a two-month period, or three weeks in a quarter – provided that the average level of absenteeism in the workplace is less than 2.5 per cent.

Government and businesses insist that the new law is necessary for Spains recovery from the global recession.

But trade unions and left-wing parties warn that the bill will increase unemployment , not reduce it, something which the already crisis-stricken Canary Islands region cannot afford.

Some 300,000 people I the archipelago are unemployed out of a total population of 2 million – a jobless rate of 30 per cent of the labour force, compared to 20 per cent in the Spanish mainland.

Reading from a prepared statement, independent local activist Izas Kun (pictured sitting second from left) said that the labour reform was an attack on trade unionism, democracy and citizen's rights.

Amid recent speculation that turnout for the strike will be less than 30 per cent, she joined the call for all workers to participate.

Ms Kun blamed the recession on the “deregulation of the markets and the avarice of the speculative economy.”

She said that the September 29 general strike was not just a right of workers, but a “democratic necessity” to manifest opposition to “a Europe governed by the merchants, with no place for the politics or public spaces of the state.”

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