Energy Oligopoly

‘The workers on strike were second-generation victims of the privatisation of the public sector and industrial dismantling of the 1990s,’ Juan Antonio Delgado Ramos, a Unidas Podemos member in Spain’s Congress of Deputies, explained to Tribune. ‘Where once there was a worker with a good salary and rights, today there is a welder who is paid €1,200 [a month] and works ten to twelve hours a day.’

Delgado is himself a San Fernando native, and the wider Cádiz province is an area with twenty-three percent unemployment and some of the highest levels of poverty in Spain. ‘The per capita income is almost half of that in Madrid,’ he says. ‘Life expectancy is eight years less than municipalities in central Spain.’

That socioeconomic disparity has been compounded by skyrocketing inflation and utility prices across Spain in recent months. In October, electricity bills were sixty-three percent higher than the previous year, according to statistics from Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística.

Indeed, the energy oligopoly—just five companies control eighty percent of electricity generation in Spain—was an underlying cause of strike action. Diego tuts. ‘The bosses were saying they have to pay the electricity,’ he says, ‘but we have to pay it too.’ Like many millions across Spain, he is now forced to avoid the higher tariffs. ‘We put the washing machine on at night or at the weekend.’

A New Agreement

Diego’s union leaders called the strike when a paltry pay offer was made in mid-November, demanding that wage increases reflect the inflation rate. An agreement was eventually made—accepted by Cádiz’s largest metalworker unions, CCOO and UGT, in major factories including Navantia and Airbus—but not until after nine days of strike action and protests, a heavy-handed police presence, and political damage for the PSOE-led coalition government.

‘The agreement is a victory for workers,’ Delgado says. ‘The proposal at the beginning was to lower wages and eliminate hazard bonuses.’ Yet, privately, the unions ‘don’t consider it a success,’ Diego admits, ‘but a step forward.’

‘Success would be a new labour agreement,’ he says. ‘That’s what we are fighting for.’ Asked what his colleagues make of the deal, he grins and gestures with his head towards the men propping up the bar. ‘Half and half.’

The deal was explained to him as a ‘two percent [increase] this year, next year another two percent, plus eighty percent of the IPC [Spain’s Consumer Price Index]’—nowhere close to inflation. And that two percent, although hard fought, ultimately means little in material terms. ‘Two percent is €20 more a month,’ David, 35, shouts over.

In the city remnants of strike action rumble on. Broken windows and anti-police graffiti dot the docks; burn marks scorched into the street mark where bonfires barricaded the bridge and blocked access to the shipyard. A demonstration by Spain’s students union weaves its way through the city, and handfuls of metalworkers from minority unions that didn’t accept the agreement linger at the back.

The demonstration passes riot police lining the street with tear gas guns in hand. Cádiz garnered national attention when Spain’s Interior Ministry sent a military tank onto the streets, and videos of police clubbing a pensioner went viral. One worker, 43, described the policing as ‘brutal against men, women, and children.’

Looking to 2023

Back in the bar, conversation turns to politics. With Spain’s next general election slated for 2023, the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition has had almost its entire term stymied by the pandemic and could realistically head into the campaign with few substantive policy successes to campaign on. Events like those in Cádiz live long in the memory and form the sort of emotional motivation that sways voters wavering at the ballot box.

Asked about Partido Popular (PP), self-described as centre-right but veering further rightward to avoid being outflanked by far-right Vox, Diego laughs: ‘I think politicians lie more than talk.’ ‘They are the same,’ someone adds, ‘without shame.’

The strike has also brought rifts between the two governing parties to the fore. It has ‘allowed us to see the differences,’ Delgado feels. ‘PSOE is… neoliberal in its management of the economy, albeit with labour and liberal rhetoric on civil rights.’

Unidas Podemos, on the other hand, he says, ‘was born in response to the rightward shift of PSOE and the neoliberal management of the economy.’ On the deployment of tanks, Delgado is clear: ‘Unidas Podemos has criticised the use of tanks and police repression of workers.’

With the government’s response to the strike widely criticised, especially as tanks weren’t deployed during a police protest bolstered by Vox supporters in Madrid earlier in the year, the prospect of the coalition heading into the next election with little to show for its time in office—for reasons both in and out of its control—seems plausible, and could present an open goal for the Right.

Polls suggest that would likely mean a PP majority propped up by Vox. ‘Even the leader of Vox said he didn’t understand the tank,’ Diego says. The far-right have now firmly separated themselves as Spain’s third party: leader Santiago Abascal wasted no time in capitalising on the move to score points.

PSOE’s labour policy, and its leader and Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, in particular, is living up to Delgado’s description: a sheen of labour rhetoric and progressive platitudes masking neoliberal conformity; a factory-issued professional politician more concerned by photo opportunities and advancing brand ‘el guapo’ than the interests of workers in Spain’s most impoverished regions.

As Sanchez posed for photos when Spain welcomed refugees from Afghanistan last month, fifty-two died trying to reach the Canary Islands. As Diego and his colleagues returned to work last week, Sanchez took time to announce a new national photo gallery.

‘Sanchez said that he would change the labour laws,’ Diego says, but ‘they have been in government for a few years and haven’t.’ Asked if he feels PSOE represents workers, he shakes his head. Unidas Podemos? ‘Something more.’

Time Is Running Out

Delgado also sees labour reform as an issue the government must tackle, and understands that Unidas Podemos will have to be the ones to do it. ‘It is expected that Yolanda Díaz [Minister for Labour and one of only five Unidas Podemos ministers in the government] will repeal PP’s labour reform.’

But for Delgado, the events in Cádiz predate the previous PP government and represent much more than striking shipyard workers, symbolising the slow-burning deindustrialisation of southern Spain. The government, he says, needs ‘to reindustrialise and direct the sectors of the economy that profit from the precarity of workers.’

Combine deindustrialisation with the shorter-term economic shocks of skyrocketing inflation, utilities, and the pandemic shutdown—Spain is predicted to be the only EU state not to recover to pre-pandemic economic levels within two years—and workers like Diego were left with no option other than strike action.

That the Eurozone’s fourth largest economy has found itself with high unemployment and swathes of its workforce in poverty or job insecurity is born from a bundle of reasons—some external, some self-inflicted—and repairing the damage requires more than one term in government.

But time is running out, and further industrial action imminent, with strikes expected in the haulage, cleaning, and agricultural sectors in the coming months. With an election looming, the Spanish Left needs to act now or risk having its entire term swallowed up—and Diego isn’t optimistic they can.

What it can do in the short term, Delgado says, is to ‘reindustrialise, repeal the labour reform, and raise the minimum wage to €1,200 [currently €965 a month].’ Whether Unidas Podemos will be able to wrangle that out of the coalition remains to be seen.