First day of the strike in the passenger transport sector, of urban and intercity bus and tow truck drivers, of the various strikes planned between now and the end of the year to demand that professionals in the sector be able to advance their retirement by dangerousness of their work.
This Monday’s strikes, for now, are marked by compliance with minimum services, the absence of incidents and, also, by delays and queues of users at stations and interchanges throughout Spain.
“It took me about 15 minutes longer to get to Madrid, it’s a long time but it’s acceptable because I already knew it could happen today,” Elvira, who has just arrived from Alcalá de Henares to the Avenida de América interchange, explains to elDiario.es. “What I don’t know is why they called the strike,” he adds. “They will have their reasons.”
In this Madrid interchange, the three bus sectors that are currently experiencing strikes come together: urban, interurban and long-distance. While in the former, the waiting lines are somewhat longer than usual, in the long-distance ones they are non-existent, waiting for the next buses that, at mid-morning on Monday, left for Bilbao and Aranda de Duero.
María del Mar, an EMT worker from Madrid, explains that she has been driving buses for 20 years. “We claim the hardship that bus drivers have. We work long hours and take travelers. We ask to be able to retire earlier because, at 65 years old, driving a bus is hard. Cars pass you and your reflexes go down, you no longer have the same capacity,” he explains in the mobilization before the Government Delegation in Madrid. In total, several hundred professionals from the sector who chant every city bus that passes and sounds its horn. One of the protesters, who works for an intercity bus company in the south of Madrid, gives examples of the health problems they suffer. “We have a lot of back problems, vision problems or varicose veins. “We spend many hours sitting.”
In the protest, Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, UGT Highway Strike Committee, assures that they are demanding a historic demand, to give legal security to the workforce. “The coefficients must be decided by the Government. “We understand that a worker over 60 years of age should not be behind the wheel because it could harm travelers.”
On this day of strikes, minimum services are being met, which the unions have described as abusive. “They are disproportionate, but they must be met,” assumes Francisco José Vegas, general secretary of the FSC-CCOO Road and Logistics sector.
Regarding the agreement with the employers, the CCOO representative points out that they are the ones who have left the table. “Our objective is not to call a strike. What we want is for a file to be initiated so that early retirement can be implemented. Until now, the employers are putting the economic cost before occupational health and road safety.”
Strike days
Last week, the unions and employers of the sector met to try to reach an agreement and suspend the strike, scheduled for November 11, 28 and 29, in addition to this Monday. Also for December 5 and 9 and indefinite from December 23, unless there is an agreement before. Both the unions and the main employers in the sector have assured that the negotiations will continue. In this topic we tell all the keys to this mobilization.
Late last Thursday there was already an agreement between the road freight transport companies and the workers’ representatives, who demanded the same measures as the bus and tow truck drivers. Specifically, they urge opening the door to early retirement for drivers, which involves the application of reducing coefficients due to the “difficulty and danger of the profession.” Workers consider that this danger represents a problem for themselves and for third parties. Also, they already “pay six times more than other workers in their contribution in regards to work accidents and occupational diseases.”
The general secretary of UGT, Pepe Álvarez, denounced this Monday, in relation to the bus drivers’ strike called for this Monday by his union and CCOO, that “there is no EU country in which drivers must drag their working life until the age of 67 as happens in Spain.”
“The employers have to be aware that the sector needs improvements in the collective agreement. “You can’t cry every day because you can’t find people to work with and then in the negotiation of the agreement you don’t even make a proposal that allows us to move forward,” he criticized.
Álvarez has disfigured the “cynicism” of the employers: “This is over. The transport sector in our country has to find a first accommodation in the relief contract from the age of 63 and this must be brought to the collective agreements,” he defended.
We must remember that, a few months ago, CCOO and UGT have already reached an agreement with the Ministry of Social Security, in the latest pension reformwhich already contemplates a new procedure to access early retirement due to hardship, which has to be developed in a regulation, in addition to the modification of partial retirement and the relief contract.
The Federation of Citizen Services of CCOO points out that it is the employers’ associations Confebus and ATUC, which total 95,000 workers, which “could sign jointly with the unions the request to initiate the procedure for applying reduction coefficients and voluntary partial retirement for their employees.” workers” and that “despite the fact that these measures are the result of tripartite agreements of social dialogue, these employers block their implementation.”
The Spanish Bus Transport Confederation (Confebús) defends that the day is developing “almost completely normally”, with a 95% degree of compliance with the minimum services, and with some incidents caused by the pickets. “So far there are around thirty broken windows, which is preventing these vehicles from carrying out the corresponding services,” says the sector’s employers.
In the Community of Madrid, minimum services are up to 75% in urban and 80% in interurban during peak hours, dropping to 50% and 45%, respectively, at other times. In Catalonia, they are 40% in peak hours and 20% in off-peak hours. As for long-distance state buses, they are 50% throughout the day.
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