Portugal was paralysed by a general strike yesterday, as workers demonstrated against austerity measures and labour reforms.
The Lisbon metro, which carries more than half a million passengers every weekday, stayed closed. Train, bus and ferry companies in the capital and the second-largest city, Porto, ran few services. Many schools, hospitals, courts, government offices, post offices, libraries, museums, refuse collection services and ports were also affected.
In the private sector, between 60 and 100 percent of workers took action at Bosch, Portugal Energy, Delphi Automotive, Parmalat, Citroen, Saint-Gobain, Tenneco, RTS Group and several large construction companies.
No official figures were available on the number of workers taking part in the strike. The right-wing Social Democratic Party/Democratic and Social Centre/People’s Party coalition decided not to issue any estimates because it would “feed a controversy that the government intends to avoid”. However, reports suggest more workers took part than the 25 percent participation in the general strike of November 2011.
This is despite the fact that Portugal’s second-largest union, the Socialist Party-aligned General Workers Union (UGT), refused to take part. The UGT was involved in last year’s general strike, but in January signed up to a package of labour market reforms demanded by the European Union and IMF in return for the €78 billion ($103 billion) troika (European Union- European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund) bailout last May. These measures allow the slashing of holiday entitlement, redundancy pay, overtime rates and unemployment benefits, increase flexible working, make it easier for employers to sack workers and undermine collective bargaining. They come on top of earlier austerity measures that cut wages and pensions, set about privatising remaining public companies, introduced payment for health care and increased VAT, fares in public transport and tuition fees.
The Portuguese government has been praised by EU leaders for dramatically reducing its budget deficit as a result of the austerity programme. The latest government estimate put the deficit for 2011 at close to 4 percent of GDP, well below the official target of 5.9 percent.
Portugal is already Western Europe’s poorest country, with economic growth stalling at one percent in the decade up to 2010. The government’s slash and burn policies have led to the worst recession, now in its second year, since 1975. In 2011, the economy contracted by 1.5 percent and forecasts suggest it will shrink by 3.3 percent this year.
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/port-m23.html
