The Basque union majority rejects the agreement for the labor reform in the streets

Demonstrations called by ELA, LAB, Steilas, ESK, Etxalde and Hiru have walked the streets of Pamplona/Iruña, Donostia-San Sebastián, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Bilbao to reject the labor reform agreement reached by the Spanish Government with the CEOE and the UGT and CCOO unions.

Together with the trade union centrals, they have taken part in the protests youth organisations, pensioner groups, as well as feminist, anti-militarist, environmentalist, anti-racist and independence movements, which have chanted slogans such as “This reform is a robbery”, “Here we work, here we decide” or “Labor reform, total repeal”.

The largest of the mobilizations has been carried out in Bilbao, from Plaza Moyúa behind a banner with the text “Lan erreforma honi ez! For the Basque labor relations framework“, signed by the convening unions, to go through the Gran Vía and finish in the Plaza del Teatro Arriaga.

The march of the capital of Navarra started from the old bus station preceded by a banner with the slogan “No to this labor reform” and has traveled downtown streets of the city to end up in Paseo Sarasate.

The demonstrators have carried other banners with slogans such as “Employers get out of the labor reform” and have chanted slogans such as “CCOO and UGT are selling us again”, “Hands up, the reform is a robbery” or “Let the crisis be paid by the capital”.

The coordinator of IS IT OVER THERE in Navarra, Imanol Pascual, explained to the media that the purpose of this demonstration was “to denounce that the agreement reached in Madrid on labor reform represents a great victory for employers”.

The employers, he said, “ten years ago saw how Rajoy approved a reform to suit him and ten years later he has a reform that maintains the most regressive elements” of it and “also does it in agreement with the PSOE, with United We Can, UGT and CCOO”.

Pascual has stated that this agreement “depicts the limits of social dialogue, which mainly benefits the employers, giving them the right to veto, and the employers never renounce their privileges.”

The social dialogue, he added, “reveals the UGT and CCOO, who have gone from staging a general strike ten years ago to accepting the worst of Rajoy’s reform as good” and also “is providing coverage so that United We Can and PSOE breach their commitment to repeal the labor reform”.

“When the supposed left disappoints the working class, the right and the extreme right rub their hands, and that is what is happening, because, today, there are real options to improve the content of the labor reform” before that it be approved in Congress, he highlighted.

However, Pascual declared, “Unidas Podemos, PSOE, UGT and CCOO are doing everything in their power to avoid improving the labor reform and we believe that this is a very sad role for what calls itself the most progressive government in history and its unions”.

After requesting the political groups to vote against the labor reform decree on Thursday, he has demanded “a framework of labor relations so that we can decide here our working conditions without interference from Madrid and respecting that in Navarra UGT and CCOO they do not have the 50% representation.

Maddalen Dorador, member of the Executive of LAB and secretary of the Federation of Private Services, has highlighted that this mobilization aims to “say no to this labor reform, because it is not a repeal, it is not what was promised by the Government of Madrid, which presented itself as the most left-wing, the most progressive in history.

“The fraud they want to do to us is historic, they have sold the working class, because they continue to make workers more precarious, they continue to impoverish us,” said Dorador, who pointed out that “we have one eye on Madrid, but both feet on Nafarroa , because the solutions are going to come from Nafarroa, because we want to regulate our working conditions here”.

If this reform goes ahead, she pointed out, “they will face us, there will be no social peace and we will continue fighting, that is the strength of the women workers.”