Eight-day Strike to Hit Spanish Ports
SPANISH trade unions called eight days of strikes for late May in protest of the government’s proposed stevedore labour reforms, while sources in Spain claim worker productivity has already intentionally decreased.
According to MANA, Unions proclaimed that they would hold strikes from May 24 until June 9, during odd hours on each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, in response to the Council of Ministers’ decision to adopt the reforms on May 12.
The government proposed a three-year transitional period for the introduction of the new system in, but the dockers’ union claims it would result in almost 7,000 job losses across the Spanish waterfront.
Maersk Line, which handles around a third of Spain’s ocean container traffic, estimates it lost 12 million euros during the previous 10 weeks of industrial action as it diverted 73 ships scheduled to call at the port of Algeciras to Tanger Med in Morocco, Sines, Portugal, and Port Said, Egypt.