LISBON – Portugal’s largest union called yesterday for a general strike on November 24th in protest against the minority socialist government’s plans for austerity measures, which will hit civil servants hard.
The strike would be the first of its kind since 2007, although that protest failed to garner much worker support.
“We are facing a situation of unjust sacrifices, where policies undermine our future,” CGTP leader Manuel Carvalho da Silva said. “This set of measures in profoundly unfair. They rob the people.” Union action has been tame in Portugal so far since the global economic crisis began, but analysts say the latest austerity moves are likely to prompt greater participation because they hit civil servants, a strongly unionised group, the hardest.
Such protests have flared across Europe since the Greek debt crisis piled market pressure for spending cuts on to Greece and other economies on the euro zone periphery. A general strike in Spain on Wednesday disrupted transport and factories.
Investors have been concerned that such protests could derail efforts to cut budget deficits. “Of course we will have protests . . . but we have to keep firm in the direction we have chosen,” finance minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said on Thursday.
Elísio Estanque, a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, said the timing of the strike just after a Nato summit, in Lisbon, in September, suggested that minority radical movements against globalisation and capitalism “will take advantage of the strike to put themselves in the spotlight”.
A spokesman for the UGT union confederation, which is close to the Socialist Party, said it was considering whether to join the strike. The government said on Wednesday that it intended to cut civil servant wages by 5 per cent, freeze pensions and raise VAT to 23 per cent from 21 per cent.
It needs parliamentary support for the measures from the opposition centre-right Social Democrats, who have previously called for spending cuts but opposed tax hikes. CGTP’s Mr Carvalho da Silva said Mr Teixeira dos Santos had become the “Number 1 public enemy of the Portuguese people”. The government’s latest measures, taken in response to European Union and investor pressure, follow tax hikes earlier this year, a deep recession in 2009 and declining purchasing power for several years.
Unemployment is above 10 per cent, the highest in two decades, and few analysts expect it to fall quickly. “We think that there are now conditions for wide protests, a wave of strife that we have not seen in decades,” said Mr Estanque. – (Reuters)