[Spanish State] Towards the General Strike

The trade-union organizations CGT, CNT, SO and CSC are moving for mobilization for shared demands, debated and adopted by the workers with a view towards a general strike. [Castellano] [Italiano]

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Towards the General Strike

The Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), Solidaridad Obrera (SO) and Coordinadora Sindical de Clase (CSC) trade unions met on 24 June 2011 in Madrid to evaluate a response to the unprecedented attack on the workers suffering as a result of cuts and the loss of political rights imposed on them by the government and the European institutions at the behest of the bosses and the markets, and against which we must respond with a coordinated campaign based on class unity and action.

The various participating unions are agreed in their complete rejection of policies which - with successive labour reforms, pension cuts, the reform of collective and social bargaining and public service cuts - once again expect the workers and the weaker layers of society to pay for the capitalist crisis.

We also agree on the need to give a common response, above our differences, so that we can move towards workers' unity through mobilization and struggle, with the participation of all those unions, workers' collectives and social movements who are opposed to the policy of demobilization and social partnership promoted by the institutionalized trade unions, the CCOO and UGT.

We believe it is necessary to break with a model of trade-union practices that over the past 30 years have led to a continual loss of rights and that at this time of acute capitalist crisis has demonstrated its complicity and the absence of any will or ability to respond to the attacks on the working class. It is a model that has promoted an institutionalized form of trade-unionism, at the service of the State, aimed at impeding mobilization and the effective participation of the working class in autonomous trade-union organizations that are prepared to struggle.

The reform of collective bargaining, that is currently going through parliament and that will lead to further serious loss of rights, is just another turn of the screw in the search to control labour unrest and social struggle, consolidating this institutional 2-union syndicalism and further diminishing the ability of other union organizations to act and the freedom of the workers.

The 24 June meeting is the first step in a process of united mobilization that over the coming months will produce common demands, debated and approved by the workers, whose objective is a General Strike with the capacity to stand up to the current onslaught and move towards the conquest of new social rights.

Events since the demonstration on 15 May have broken the climate of passivity and have moved us into a phase of mobilization that is unprecedented since the beginning of the crisis, which must now move into the workplaces and place the workers' social and economic demands at the centre of public debate, by contributing to this movement with the tools necessary for confrontation and struggle in the economic and labour fields, and complementing the social and political demands with concrete action against capitalism.

The situation demands that we respond proportionally with a force that is equal to that of the measures imposed on the workers. We thus believe it is essential not only to continue with the labour struggles we are carrying on at the moment, but also to move ahead, break once and for all with the model of institutionalized trade-unionism and create a precendent in which it is the class-struggle trade unions who set the pace through offensive action to achieve our goals.

Translation by FdCA-International Relations Office