Coming Alive

A curious thing happened in Madrid. To promote their demands for higher pay, 3,000 telephone-equipment workers took to the streets on New Year's Eve and started marching toward the center of town. Police headed them off and arrested six leaders of the march. Then an even more curious thing happened. Last week the workers staged a sitdown strike to protest the arrests--and won. Before the strike was five hours old, the police, at the behest of the Labor Ministry, dropped charges against all six labor leaders and released them.

Sting Removed. The strike in Madrid was not an isolated case. After long years of suppression by the Franco regime, the Spanish labor movement is beginning to come alive. Late in 1965, Franco signed a law granting Spaniards the right to strike for the first time since the Civil War. True enough, the right was carefully limited. No strike that had the slightest political overtones would be allowed, and no strike of any kind could be called until labor leaders had gone through weeks of mediation and complicated bureaucratic process to obtain government permission.

But with the sting of official disapproval removed from the act of striking, the regime has not tried to enforce all the law's stipulations. Government mediators have been working furiously since mid-December to try to head off a nationwide rail strike threatened by the National Transportation Syndicate, a supposedly docile trade union controlled by the government. In Barcelona last week, a series of sitdown strikes at the government-owned SEAT auto plant brought a government agreement to study the workers' demands for higher pay. In Bilbao, 750 sheet-metal workers have been on strike since the end of November to protest "contract violations" by their employer.

Modicum of Affluence. Even before they were granted the right to strike, the workers' lot had been gradually improving. Under pressure from the boss of its own sindicatos, a labor-minded Falangist named Jose Solis Ruiz, the regime has raised the minimum wage twice in the past ten years, from 60-c- a day to $1.40. And that is only a starting point. Most Spanish workers also take home incentive pay, family allowance and a variety of other fringe benefits that boost their average income to between $4 and $7 a day. Their paychecks stretch a long way. Rent seldom comes to more than $40 a month. Potatoes cost 3-c- a lb., bread 7-c-, wine 12-c- a liter.

Just at a time when he is beginning to enjoy a modicum of affluence, however, the Spanish worker is being pressed by inflation, which is running at a rate of about 5% a year, and by a slowdown of the general boom that Spain has enjoyed for the past seven years. Production lines no longer operate day and night, overtime has been reduced, and many factories have been forced to lay off some of their working force. Result: a wave of strikes aimed at maintaining the standard of living to which the workers have only recently become accustomed. Once a worker is making $200 a month, he finds it difficult to settle for less--particularly when it may mean losing his television set and his car to the finance companies.

The worker may not have to settle for less in the long run, for more liberalization is apparently in the offing. Spain's new constitution, approved by Spanish voters last month, calls for a complete overhaul of the nation's labor laws. The legislation is still being drawn up, but it is expected to include a general relaxation of government control over the sindicatos, the nation's only legal labor organizations, and thus to make them more representative of the workers' demands. If the recent past is any indication, it may not be long before strikes no longer make news in Franco's Spain.

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