The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has held its XX congress in recent days in the Madrid town of Parla. The general secretary since 2022, Miguel Fadrique, has won by a very narrow margin and has placed the general strike over the housing access crisis as the union's main priority. “We were clear that whoever was elected from here, the first thing we had to do was sit down at the table with the tenant unions and the social movements and set a date for the general strike,” Fadrique said, in statements provided by her union. At the same time, the majority unions with the most presence in companies, CC OO and UGT, continue to gauge how to respond to the clamor in favor of the general strike for housing, aware of the difficulties it entails transcending the strictly labor sphere.
"At the CGT we are betting on a 24-hour general strike. Measures less than that, I don't think they will be of much use," added Fadrique. Thus, if CGT takes the step, even without scheduling, workers will have the legal umbrella to not go to their jobs in protest against the housing crisis. If CGT calls on its own, without CC OO and UGT joining in, last year's scenario would be repeated, in October. The anarchist union then called a general strike to protest Israel's massacre in Gaza. CC OO and UGT did not support this initiative, but they did call for partial strikes. In addition to continuing to participate in demonstrations, these strikes of one or two hours are one of the options with which the centers could respond again.
That call, only signed by CGT, did not have a great following, and hence many protesters are questioning the organizations led by Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez, aware that without their muscle in the companies it will be more difficult to have a relevant follow-up. According to the latest statistics on collective agreements from the Ministry of Labor, UGT and CC OO participated last year in the signing of 628 and 619 agreements respectively, compared to 51 for CGT.
Sources familiar with the conversations within CC OO and UGT maintain that all possibilities are open, but that at the moment it is difficult for them to end up calling a general strike. Unions are hesitant for several reasons. One of the most important is that, they consider, general strikes are proposed to the Government of the day, and this Executive has tried to carry out some decrees on this problem for which the UGT and CC OO requested a favorable vote. At the same time, they also doubt because the demand is not only labor-related, because the problem has very different effects depending on the territory and because of political uncertainty. Be that as it may, a key factor will be whether Pedro Sánchez calls the polls this Monday.
Officials from CC OO and UGT listened to the Tenants' Union this Friday, in a meeting to learn about their proposals. Late Friday, the unions issued a joint statement. “CCOO and UGT call on the Spanish working class to fill the streets this weekend in all the mobilizations that are being called throughout the country, to demand that the right to housing be placed above speculative interests,” they indicated, before adding: “Both unions will share with civil society their assessments and the actions they must undertake in the coming weeks, incorporating the world of work into the mobilizations in the characterization that all organizations "Let us come together with the objective of joining the majority of the citizens of this country."
CEOE, for its part, has criticized the possibility of calling a general strike for this reason. The president of the employers' association, Antonio Garamendi, does not see a possible general strike for housing as “within the law” since “it is not within a labor conflict.” This was stated this Saturday in the Pontevedra town of O Grove. For him, the housing problem is “real” and “complex”, so it cannot be solved with “simple approaches” because these “fix absolutely nothing”. Garamendi stressed that if people want to demonstrate, employers “have nothing to say,” but a strike “is regulated by law” and only occurs when there is a “labor conflict.”
The unions reject this approach: they emphasize that according to the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, general strikes of a purely political nature are illegal, but if they are of a mixed nature, so that a labor motivation or impact can be interpreted, they are legal. The centrals have been claiming the importance of housing prices in the daily lives of workers, to the point that they are already demanding that it be taken into account when negotiating salary increases, and not just inflation or the company's results.
In the CGT congress, Fadrique has prevailed over Nuria Isabel Negro by a very narrow margin: the former revalidates the leadership of CGT with 689 votes, compared to 639 for his rival, according to the count provided by the current general direction. Sources familiar with the discussions in the union emphasize that it has been very tense, with strong clashes between the union factions.
