Labour disputes bring February strikes in Spain starting today
The Spanish railway workers’ unions CCOO and SCF launched a 23-hour strike at midnight on 9 February. The strike is expected to affect traffic throughout the country, with 65 per cent of rail freight services not running. This results from a labour dispute with infrastructure manager Adif concerning the number of working hours per week and the elimination of income categories among employees.
This will not be the first time Spanish railways are affected by industrial action in February. Another union, UGT, has already announced a series of three two-hour-long strikes that will occur on Mondays, 12, 19, and 26 February.
Understandably, those strikes will be less impactful than a 23-hour-long strike impairing most of the freight traffic in the country. Nevertheless, if the dispute between the unions and Adif persists, one cannot exclude the possibility of further escalation, as in France last year and Germany at the beginning of 2024.
The struggle is real for European rail
Strikes are becoming an increasingly pressing issue for railway companies throughout Europe, on top of other persisting problems, including inflation, skyrocketing service prices, increased competition with road transport and unfavourable policies.
Railway operators have been struggling to maintain their market share, with companies stopping services in some cases and ringing the alarm bell for customers turning increasingly to road transport to achieve better prices and more predictability in their supply chains.
Strikes are the cake’s frosting in this sense, adding more pressure to the already strained industry that has protested against them. One such example is Rail Cargo Group, with its CEO Clemens Först commenting that GDL’s strikes in Germany are a significant setback and detour on the journey to a sustainable future, apart from killing business.
Speaking of business, another smaller freight and logistics company, Bentheimer Eisenbahn AG, reportedly lost 10 per cent of their sales in January due to the situation. France, Germany, and now Spain are examples of how disruptions can affect rail supply chains domestically and internationally. The question now is what is left to expect in 2024, which is forecasted to be a very interesting year, hopefully for the right reasons.
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