The momentous general strike and a unique way of mobilising millions to action

Ben Wray is a freelance journalist and researcher from Scotland, who lives in the Basque Country. Ben is co-author of Scotland After Britain (Verso Books, 2022). He produces the Gig Economy Project Substack.

Cross-posted from Counterfire

 

“On September 23, Maricarmen Abascal was evicted and no one knew what was going to happen then,” Alicia del Río, spokesperson for the Union of Tenants of Madrid, said. “Forty days later, not only have we done it in Madrid, but throughout the state we have paralysed economic life with a historic general strike, because the popular power we are building is unstoppable.”

Spain’s general strikes – eight in the post-Franco dictatorship era – have typically been a rearguard action against regressive labour reforms. This was different: this was an offensive general strike for the right to housing, pushed from below by a grassroots movement that emerged in wake of 87-year-old Maricarmen’s eviction on a stretcher, after a vulture fund sought to raise her rent by nearly 500%.

The housing movement occupied squares all across the country, demanding the government take action to end evictions. The centre-left Spanish Government, which does not have a majority, responded by proposing two housing decrees, one moderate and the other radical. The more radical decree responded directly to the tenants’ union demand for open-ended rental contracts.

The government expected the Spanish Congress to defeat the more radical measure and support the moderate one, but in a surprise, the parliament voted against both. Centre-right Catalan independence party Junts Per Catalunya – rumoured to be under pressure from its sponsors in the Catalan banking and real estate sectors – voted alongside Spanish right-wing parties PP and Vox to defeat the two housing decrees.

The movement responded by organising even bigger mobilisations and pressing demands on unions to call a general strike. At first, the two big Spanish unions UGT and CCOO appeared reluctant, but they soon got on board when it was clear that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was using the defeat of the housing decrees as a springboard for a General Election. The vote will take place on 29 November, with the General Strike widely and correctly seen as a political intervention in the debate, even if political general strikes are formally forbidden.

The tenants’ union estimated that five million people took part in the 11 November strike, about one in ten Spaniards. Unions report that participation was “uneven”: in the coastal cities that have seen rental prices skyrocket, the participation rate was over 75%. In central Spain, areas that are suffering from depopulation, participation was much lower, around 40%. Such is the uneven economic geography of the speculative housing market.

Only about one in eight Spanish workers are dues-paying trade union members today. Most of those are in the public sector. Gone are the days when a general strike could completely halt production in the country. Nonetheless, 90% of automotive workers joined the strike, 85% of meat workers, 82 per cent of waste collectors, and 75% of energy workers. Important docks, like in Cadiz in the south-west, were completely shutdown.

Local mobilisation comittees

The occupations of the squares transitioned into 1,340 local committees to mobilise neighbourhoods to come out and join the general strike. Organisers say they distributed four million leaflets and put up more than 600,000 posters. They got 20,000 civil society organisations to commit to supporting the action. In a largely post-industrial European economy, this model of organising which connects together workers’ power with community and tenant based organising may be a template to follow.

Large demonstrations took place in all of the major cities. Amnesty International issued a statement condemning the police violence against protestors, with footage of police charging into the strikers, batons raised, in Madrid’s Gran Vía. The verbal opposition of Spain’s right-wing was no less vociferous: Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s Trumpian president of the Community of Madrid, said the trade unions were “trash”, “a mafia” and were holding “citizens hostage”. Far-right Vox leader Santiago Abascal said the strike should be illegal.

PP and Vox have their tails up. After the Urda train disaster, which killed 69 and was the second deadly railway accident this year, the feeling is that the right-wing have got Sánchez on the run. The Spanish Prime Minister has proved a canny operator over the years, tactically adept and with his finger on the pulse of the masses, but he has ultimately failed to address Spain’s most pressing social problem, the housing crisis, while the country’s decades-long lack of investment in public infrastructure has come back to bite him.

High stakes election

While Sánchez has been lauded by the liberal left internationally, Spain remains a low-waged economy over-reliant on precarious service jobs. Most of the economic growth of recent years has been in low-productivity sectors like tourism. Since 2023, GDP has grown by about 10%, but GDP per hour worked has grown by just 2.5%. Population growth due to high rates of immigration has driven GDP upwards, rather than any fundamental improvement in the dynamism of Spanish capitalism.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis has only deepened, as tourists take up an ever greater share of the housing stock as speculators run amok. Spain has just 2% of housing in public ownership, one of the lowest rates in the whole of Europe. Young people on average move out of their parents house when they are 30 years old. While the media has largely depicted the general strike as a strike against the right-wing opposition and in favour of the government, the youth-led protests across Spain made it clear on Wednesday that Sánchez also has responsibility for doing next to nothing over eight years, until Maricarmen’s eviction, to address the problem.

Nonetheless, the housing movement is now the one thing that could save Sánchez on 29 November. Everyone in Spain knows that the right-wing will do nothing to stop the speculators, while they believe the left just might. If Spaniards go to the voting booths thinking about the Ceuta migration crisis or the Urda train disaster, PSOE is surely doomed. If instead they vote thinking about airbnbs and vulture funds, Sánchez may defy political gravity once more.

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