More than 80,000 bus drivers are called to a general strike in road passenger transport that begins this Monday to demand the application of a specific early retirement due to risky working conditions in the sector.
CCOO and UGT maintain the call, from 00:00 hours this Monday, October 28, for a strike that will affect intercity, urban buses, discretionary and school transport; as well as self-propelled cranes.
Initially, the strike affected 300,000 workers, including truck drivers (about 220,000 employed), who have been left out of the call when agreements were reached for both the transport of goods and healthcare.
The CCOO and UGT strike call, which has been supported by the majority of the rest of the unions, demands the application of age-reducing coefficients for access to retirement in the sector for activities that pose a certain risk.
A historic demand for 20 years
This is a historic demand that the unions began to put on the table in 2004 and that has been the reason, since then, for different mobilizations, although this is the first time that a general strike has been called.
This Monday’s mobilization, during which a rally is planned in front of the Government Delegation in Madrid, will be the first day of strike of the seven called and which will continue on November 11, 28 and 29; December 5 and 9; and, as of the 23rd of that month, it could become indefinite.
The deputy secretary general of the Federation of Services, Mobility and Consumption (FeSMC) of UGT, Pedro Aller, explained this week that, after the unions lowered their approach to the minimum that they considered essential, the freight transport employers’ associations have accepted it, but not those of travelers.
The agreement includes the commitment to implement preventive measures in companies and contemplates the possibility of adjusting costs to facilitate the necessary contributions in the merchandise sector and apply the reducing coefficients.
The traveler employers that sit at the negotiating table – Confebus, Atuc, Anetra and Direbús, in addition to the Anagrual cranes – “hide behind an issue of costs”, which the unions do not see “anywhere”, Aller explained.
The general secretary of the Road and Logistics sector of the Federation of Citizen Services of CCOO (FSC-CCOO), Francisco José Vegas, told EFE that, until the time of the start of the strike, “there is always the option of calling it off, but the conditions really do not exist.”
Union sources consulted this Sunday explain that there has been, at least for now, no news in this regard.
For the unions, the employers “has swerved” and has left the table, despite the fact that “there were enough points to be able to reach an agreement”, something to which they are still open as long as it adheres to “the “the same terms that have been done with those of merchandise.”
The employers ask for the strike to be called off
According to the Association of Urban and Metropolitan Public Transport (Atuc) and the Spanish Confederation of Bus Transport (Confebus), the mobilization has been called without the dialogue table prior to any strike call, for which they have requested CCOO and UGT its recall.
And they have asked the unions to open a dialogue table to discuss, among other issues, all aspects related to early retirement, they reported in a statement.
Astuc and Confebus have recalled that they bring together road passenger transport companies that, together, have more than 95,000 workers, serving nearly 3.15 billion travelers each year.
As for the minimum services, they must be published by the administrations that own the service, which, in some cases, is the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility; and, in others, from the autonomous communities and the town councils themselves.
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