On November 14, 2012, thousands of people took to the streets of Portugal as part of
a European-wide general strike.
Until recently, Portugal had been held up as the ideal example of the effectiveness of
austerity policies.
But now, its economy is heading in the same direction as Greece and Spain.
We are being struck with exactly the same measures and the same consequences as what
happened in Greece and in Spain, in Ireland and all over the world.
Portugal right now has a negative birth rate, so there are dying more people than are born.
And this government is telling us to go outside, to emigrate.
We have youth unemployment that's huge.
Some people talk about 40%, 50% unemployment.
The government says overall unemployment is at 16%.
And the actual attitude of the people who protest has definitely changed and you can
see that.
Many people in Portugal are breaking their silence and taking to the streets.
The main thing about the latest demonstrations probably is that they were slightly bigger
than we were used to, which means that people are waking up finally and realizing that if
they don't do anything, things will just get worse every time.
The turning point came this past September, when protesters successfully halted a plan
to significantly raise worker contributions to social security.
And ever since September, when there was another huge demonstration following these measures
of austerity that were highly unpopular, ever since then it's become a kind of this tradition
and must do that the barriers in front of the parliament or in front of the institutions
will have to go down, that something is burned there, that throwing things at right police
is kind of normal.
So more and more people come to these demonstrations waiting for something different to happen,
waiting for defiance to happen.
The CGTP, filling the pressure from the population, called for a pan-European general strike on
November 14th.
Mobilizations were called for in Spain, Greece, Italy, Belgium and several other European
countries.
Obviously the general strike has the power to show that we will not keep fooling their
pockets.
All the fact that the general strike was called first in Portugal on the 14th of November
by the trade unions and then other trade unions joined was important in European level.
If you can go more and more towards this kind of international mobilization and dimension
maybe the soft nationalism that kind of comes up in most of the demonstrations against austerity
will lose some of its ground and we'll be able to create this idea, this strong idea
that we're in this international situation, international problems and that we need to
organize our struggles in an international way.
In Lisbon, the buildup to the strike coincided with a visit from German Chancellor Angela
Merkel on November 12th, a small but spirited demonstration marched to Berlin where she
was meeting with Prime Minister Pedro Passo Cuerno.
Merkel is here in Lisbon and there was a march coming from Calvalho and basically we arrived
here and there were fences all over the place and people just started shouting and basically
they took down the fences.
Speak informally.
The day of protest against Merkel ended without any major incidents.
On November 14, the day of the strike, the metro system in Lisbon was shut down and
most public transportation was halted.
Unions, activists and students organized roving pickets to encourage non-unionized workers
to join the strike.
Right now at the moment I'm with this picket where we are going to appeal to the local
shops to join this general strike.
The picket started in the morning and was, I think, because I've been in other general
strikes and I think it's been the biggest general strike that we have so far.
Workers are doing a general strike and we students think it's our duty also to make
use of it.
We think students are given three chances by the government right now.
It's precarity, unemployment and immigration.
So we are not being able to study and we are thinking that we won't be able to work when
we finish our courses.
At the Lisbon Ave shipyards there was a 96% work stoppage while 90% of the workers at
the Bosch factory went on strike and the EDP hydroelectric plant at Sines was shut down
entirely.
Many factories in the auto industry, the pulp and engineering sectors had over 60% of their
workers joining the strike.
Dark workers who have been in an extended struggle over plans to change labour laws organized
a feeder march that included precarious workers, anarchists and participants from the Portuguese
indignados movement.
Dockers over here in Portugal are fighting in the last three months, trying to revoke
a law who is to be imposed without discussion with the unions.
The fact that the dark workers are coming more and more to the streets because they are
in an ongoing conflict against the big capitalist interests that run the ports here in Portugal
and because they are in this crucial sector of activity which is the transportation, the
possibility to export things, their struggle is having a lot of impact both in the economy
and in the streets.
And so they are kind of this exemplary struggle, I mean it's a struggle against precarity,
it's a struggle against the big business that run the Portuguese economy and it's a struggle
against these government austerity measures.
The feeder marches joined the CGTP contingent to march together towards parliament where
they held a large rally.
What happened then is that CGTP in their very particular style, they had their protest for
about an hour and a half and I would say at about 5, 5.30 CGTP, the labour union, officially
left the protest and so officially the protest ended and we continued with it, the social
movements.
Mind you a lot of the contingent that's part of the CGTP protest actually stayed there
which is quite new.
Meanwhile, it's become a tradition to take down the barriers which I think shouldn't
even be there in the first place.
Some of the crowd attempted to push through police lines and were met with police batons.
Others angered by the police reaction through paving stones, fireworks and bottles at the
police.
Before, where perhaps a small group would start violence, many people would leave, especially
people with children, many older people would leave, now you don't see that anymore.
That certainly does reflect the radicalization of the people and I think some of the real
spontaneous violence that we see and so indeed in this protest is a real genuine reflection
of the suffering that the people are going through.
And we have a political system that doesn't really give many viable, realistic, effective
The November 14th general strike marked a dramatic departure from the image of the Portuguese
as the passive recipients of austerity.
Something has come out of the bottle that's still not ready to go back.
More people are coming and more people are realizing that whenever they go out and struggle
on the streets that they get something out of it.
After we win the battle against this, you know we have to win under battles following
and we do it on the streets as historically it has been.
And I would actually call on the Portuguese government to not underestimate us because
we might seem like we're passive, we might seem like we accept everything and anything,
but I think there's a limit to everything and from what I see, I think we're reaching
that limit right now.
