On March 29th, 2012, millions of people across Spain went on strike.
The strike, which was the first general strike since September 2010, brought the country
to a near halt.
The situation in Spain has grown increasingly difficult, with one in four people out of
work and many struggling to make rent or mortgage payments.
In Spain, right now, is it about 25 percent? Amongst youth, it's at about 50 percent.
If you say five million of people don't have a shop, yeah, it's all right.
But if you see the face of the people, it's different.
People are so fed up in Spain.
Our economics is not working, our politics is not working, our unions are not working,
as our legal system is not working.
In capitalist society, there is a continuous crisis, and if not continuous, there is a
totally unpredictable situation.
The major trade unions joined forces with smaller trade unions, anarchists, pensioners, the unemployed
and the 15 May movement.
The result was a strike that mobilized all sections of society, targeting not only production,
but also consumption.
We thought as a movement to reinvent the way we do a strike.
In Barcelona, there were nearly 70 local neighborhood protests.
Local assemblies organized their own pickets, which went door to door chanting, throwing
fireworks and shutting down businesses that refused to honor the general strike.
On the 29th of March, in addition to the labor union strikes, pickets in different workplaces
and all of this, and in different neighborhoods, you started to see, well, neighborhood assemblies
of different types of non-union workers contributing and doing sort of informative pickets where
they just kind of informed folks of why they shouldn't go to work that day or why they
shouldn't open those doors that day.
So that they don't take away what we had already achieved, the rights, above all, rightful
functions.
We were satisfied because of the percentage of following of the strike.
It was quite big, over 80% here in Barcelona, but also in many other places in Spain.
Schools, universities, construction, and heavy industries all went on strike.
Auto, rubber, steel, petrochemical, food, mining, and manufacturing industries also went on
strike.
Building sites stood idle, and 91% of long-distance rail workers went on strike, bringing transport,
shipping, and distribution to a halt.
All across the country, cities were at a standstill.
Many highways were blocked, and several ports were paralyzed.
You also saw university students who had occupied strategically placed campuses, kind of giving
more force to the sort of transportation blockades.
You saw folks blocking major centers of economic activity, such as Mercabarna, which is the
place where all of the food comes in.
The ports got blocked up, along with consumption strike, which was another way to allow people
for whom striking in the workplace may be too risky.
It allowed them another way to participate by just not consuming anything that day.
We could easily reach consumers and individuals that are not organized or they don't feel
represented by unions, and asking them and explaining them that it's not only to stop
working this day, it's much more if you don't have to spend a lot of money on this 29th
of March.
I think that's where you saw, on the 29th of March, this acceptance of a new phase for
civil society where the indignados are coming together with union workers, coming together
with workers of all types, really.
Corporate chain stores that refused to close their doors were shut down by large crowds
that were discouraging people from shopping, small groups of people blockading the doors,
and targeted property damage.
The Barcelona Stock Exchange, major shopping centers, and banks were primary targets.
What happened eventually was they basically left the space between the Corte Inglés
and Starbucks and a number of other places, basically the whole space around Fata Catalunya.
They had enclosed that, but they didn't really have any police near these spaces, they were
kind of closing it in from the outside.
Folks started to don masks and set the Starbucks on fire, set the Corte Inglés on fire, set
several bank offices on fire.
What was really striking about it was just the level of acceptance from protesters of
what was going on.
The police responded to the strike with filens, they fired rubber bullets and tear gas and
charged the crowds with batons.
One protestor lost his eye to a rubber bullet and many others were hospitalized.
Despite police aggression, small decentralized actions occurred throughout central Barcelona
late into the night.
In the end, there were 104 reported injuries and 176 arrests.
The day after the strike, Mariano Rajoy's conservative government announced the most
severe austerity package yet, with 27.3 billion euros in proposed cuts.
With the situation in Spain likely to deteriorate, the strike was widely viewed as merely a taste
of things to come, as protesters prepare for the upcoming global days of action from May
12th to May 15th.
The 29th of March is a transition point towards the 12 May 15 May mobilizations.
On the 12th of May, there's going to be a global protest that is very similar to the
15 October mobilizations, but I think we're going to take it up a notch this time.
We're just people who is fed up and we are working so hard on the 12 May 15 May.
We are organizing ourselves to have a bigger demonstration.
The people are still angry.
I think people are more angry before.
On the 15th of May, we're going to be talking about a lot more stuff than just the labor
reform.
We're talking about democracy.
We're talking about social rights.
We're talking about social justice.
So I think on those days, we're going to see mobilizations that really up the ante
quite a bit.
