Friday 2 March 2012

Against Labor Reform in Spain

On March 1, together with some Spanish students and expats, we protested against the labor reforms in Spain at the Spanish Embassy.

Below is a press release we sent about the action and the protest letter sent by the Spanish to the Ambassador.We also referred to a similar action held in Wroclaw the day before, but focusing on the police violence against students in Valencia.

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General Strike against the Labor Reform!

The ZSP-IWA supports the struggle agains the labor reform and condemns police brutality

On February 29 and March 1 there will be two actions in Poland related to the situation in Spain. On February 29 we will protest in Wroclaw against police brutality towards student protests in Valencia, against the cuts in education and the attack against workers in Spain. On March 1, we are protesting together with students and other Spanish people against the labor reform in front of the Spanish Embassy.

The ZSP considers the labor reforms in Spain to be part of a global attack against the rights and material conditions of the working class and that only a determined, international struggle can stop the bloodsuckers who are exploiting us. Some symbolic protests are not enough. We have to organize ourselves in militant unions, with no interest in maintaining the system, without compromise.

We support the stance of our comrades from the CNT-AIT who are mobilizing around Spain against the labor reform, towards an indefinite general strike.

Not one step back!
Solidarity with those who are fighting!


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To the Spanish Ambassador in Poland, D. Francisco Fernández Fábregas.

The people who have gathered today in front of the Embassy of Spain are raising our voice against the labour reform spearheaded by the new Spanish government.

We are students, graduate fellows, wage labourers, apprentices and expats seeing the attack against the working class that the Spanish government is producing with anxiety and sadness.

The labour reform driven by the government of the PP strengthens neoliberal ideas in the worker-boss relationship and supposes the greatest loss of workers rights in democratic Spain. Among other things, it facilitates low-cost dismissals, does away with collective bargaining in the sectors, weakens the power of unions, promotes opt-outs from collective agreements and in practice will eliminate the unfair dismissal.

But we are protesting here, like thousands of people in Spain, not only against this labour reform, but also against a cruel and insatiable economic model that seeks only to increase the rate of return on capital, to destroy worker organizations and pass the consequences of the crisis onto the workers. It is capitalism - a model that since the industrial revolution has been adapting to the times with a common denominator: the exploitation of the vast majority of the population by a small group of people, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in its appropriation of the work of proletariat. Moreover, it sustains an imperialist strategy which continues since the times of colonization, so that the bourgeoisie exploits not only its own population; this exploitation is articulated at the international level to carry out geo-strategic wars and continue plundering the poorest people on the planet.

We are faced with an economic model that the successive governments of Spain have promoted and imposed, a model whose consequences are, among other things, the highest unemployment rate we've known and household debt for 11 million people below the poverty line in our country. The capitalist model destroys the environment, feeds the inequality on our planet, eliminates society as such and leaves the individual in fierce competition with his brothers for the right to work and sustenance. "Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit." a model which leaves women in a more precarious situation in the labour and social chain.

It is a model which you are responsable for since your duty as rulers is to work for capital and the multinationals but not for the people that elected you. Instead of making the changes that history requires, not for us since our could be irretrievably lost already, but for those who come after us, a turn towards humanism, ecology, pacificism and equality, you have decided to maintain your position, your cannibalism of natural resources and the exploitation of workers.

It is for this reason that the workers', union and student struggle is more active than ever since the moral and ethical turpitude of the capitalist system, unequal and injust by definition, is unable to meet the needs of the working class and once more it will be the people who change the course of history.

We are here to strongly oppose this labor reform but also to demonstrate our will to unite out voices and spirit with the same flame that ignited in the Arab countries, in the Spanish squares, in Greece and in an unstoppable and resolute manner it will spread all over Europe to create the social changes that you, directed by the troika, did not.