Spain's 11 November general strike comes nearly 14 years after the last one in 2012

A strike with a long run in Spain

Spain's strike on 11 November comes almost 14 years after the last general strike, which took place in 2012. The country has had ten general strikes since the first one in June 1985, when Felipe González was in Moncloa. Adolfo Suárez faced two of them and González four, and El Confidencial puts the rate at roughly one every five years. Most strikes have traditionally been defensive, reacting to a specific policy of the government in office.

The 1988 strike and its fallout

The strike of 14 December 1988 is the one most remembered. It halted a youth employment plan that the unions said made work more precarious, and González eventually backed down. An estimated 7.8 million of the 8.2 million wage earners, or 95%, took part, and electricity consumption fell 34% within 24 hours. On the night of the strike, the screens in the country's 14 million households went black at midnight. A book by union leader Jaime Martínez describes how two RTVE employees cut the sound, after which the picture mixer also blacked out the screen. Felipe González called elections months later and lost his absolute majority, falling to 175 seats. Pilar Miró, then RTVE's director general, had not obstructed the strike, and El Confidencial says it ended her political career.

The strikes that targeted reforms

The 2002 strike opposed a decree by José María Aznar that forced unemployed people to accept job offers that did not match their CVs. The Constitutional Court later ruled that the measure should have been a decree-law. In 2010 the strike targeted José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for opening the door to dismissals for economic causes with 20 days. In 2012 two strikes were called against Mariano Rajoy's labour reform, which made dismissal cheaper. That 2012 walkout was the second his government faced in eight months, as a rejection of his spending cuts.

The 11-N context

El Confidencial argues that this 11-N will be very different from 1988, not least because RTVE stopped being a monopoly almost four decades ago. The bigger change is the world of work itself. Union membership has reached its lowest level, although Spain's collective bargaining coverage is one of the highest in the EU. Individual labour relations, helped along by technological change, have done the rest. The outlet also notes that in France and Italy strikes now tend to be offensive or preventive rather than defensive, which is a shift from the traditional pattern in which unions reacted to a government's policies.