Concern over prison threat to Spanish strikers

Spain’s two main union confederations, CCOO and UGT, are expressing deep concern over a growing tendency for the country’s state prosecutors to call for prison sentences for those involved in strikes.

In a report presented to the head of the judicial authorities, the two confederations have established that 81 cases have been opened against 260 union members, with prosecutors calling for prison sentences totalling 120 years.

Spain’s penal code includes an article under which “coercing other people to start or continue a strike” carries a penalty of up to three years in prison, and the unions fear that the way this article is being applied has changed.

“For 35 years there has been a constitutionally correct interpretation of the right to strike,” said Cándido Méndez, the UGT’s general secretary, “but now there is an imbalance in favour of the penal code and against workers”. The aim, according to Ignacio Fernández Toxo, head of the CCOO, is to discourage strikers and “de facto to change the right to strike”.

Thousands attended a union-organised rally in Madrid on 1 July to protest against these developments.

Katiana Vicens, head of the CCOO in the Balearic Islands, who herself faces four-and-a-half years in prison for her actions, told the rally that union freedoms were threatened, and that “if we don’t fight to defend them we will lose them all”.