The floods in Valencia expose the passivity of the Spanish trade unions

On November 13, 2024By Pranco

The devastating floods in Valencia that claimed more than 223 lives, destroyed entire towns and destroyed tens of thousands of homes, exposed the bankrupt bureaucracies of the Sumar-linked Workers’ Committees (CCOO) and the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT) unions . .

Residents walk in a street after flooding in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, Wednesday, October 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Alberto Saiz)

Popular anger is growing against the entire political establishment, from the Valencian regional government led by right-wing Prime Minister Carlos Mazón of the Partido Popular (PP), to the National Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez .

Last Saturday, more than 130,000 people took part in a march, shouting “Murderers, murderers,” “Mazón, resign” and “Only the people save the people.” There were also signs reading ‘Mazón, your people reject you, do not forget and do not forgive’, ‘We are smeared with mud, you are stained with blood’ and ‘Neither Mazón, nor Madrid, nor Bourbons (Monarchy)’. These were the largest protests in the region since the anti-war protests against Iraq in 2003.

The CCOO and UGT bureaucracies are not fighting against Mazón and Sánchez, or against measures to combat climate change, but instead intervene to repress and demobilize the workers. They protect the capitalist state’s criminally negligent response to the floods and conceal their own role in what the WSWS rightly describes as social murder.

On October 29, the day the deadly floods hit Valencia, CCOO and UGT met with Mazón and the major business platform in Valencia, the Confederación Empresarial de la Comunitat Valenciana (Business Confederation of the Valencia Region) to discuss the regional budget.

In the five days leading up to the meeting, the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) had repeatedly warned of a possible severe storm, with heavy rain forecast across Valencia. Hours before union officials met with Mazón, AEMET issued a red alert – the highest level – indicating the risk of extreme rainfall.

Despite these repeated warnings and Valencia’s known vulnerability to flooding, especially after the 2019 floods that claimed at least six lives, the unions have not issued a public alarm, called for workplaces to close or advised people to stay at home. They went about their normal business.

Instead, Mazón denounced in their presence the measures to close the University of Valencia (UV) as ‘exaggerated’. The UV emergency committee, which was established in 2019 for just such a storm, had already sent a message to all its students the day before announcing the suspension of classes due to the forecast of heavy rainfall. This affected 50,000 students, 3,000 technical, administrative and support staff and more than 5,000 professors.

The UV closure should be the standard response to deadly storm conditions, but it was an exception. Union officials could have summoned union representatives in factories and workplaces across the region to implement Article 21.3 of the Occupational Risk Prevention Act. This law provides that if “the employer does not adopt or cause to be adopted the necessary measures to guarantee the safety and health of employees, its legal representatives may decide by majority vote to suspend the activity of employees affected by this risk.”

To date, the number of workers killed is unknown. Due to the criminal inaction of the union bureaucracies, hundreds of thousands of workers were forced to report to work during the floods. Major billion-dollar retailers, including Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Lefties, Zara and La Tagliatella, decided to stay open. In the El Oliveral industrial zone in Riba-roja, more than a thousand workers were trapped in the rising water.

Social media platforms such as X and Instagram were full of videos of witnesses pleading for help, with some calling emergency services to save friends and loved ones. The situation at Ikea went viral because employees and some customers had to spend the night in the store. More than 400 car workers at Ford’s Almussafes plant were stranded.

Many truck drivers were stranded on the roads: some were not rescued for days, others died. Among the known victims were José Hernaiz, a truck driver who went missing in l’Alcúdia and was later found dead, and Bassem Zetión, whose DHL truck was suddenly overtaken by floods and is still missing.

After the disaster, as mass anger grew over the lack of preparedness and Mazón’s role in downplaying storm warnings, the union bureaucracies joined the rest of the political establishment in covering up their role in the social murder. Like the PSOE-Sumar government, they rejected calls for Mazón’s resignation.

They issued a joint statement four days later, when Prime Minister Sánchez and Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia were pelted with mud during a visit to Paiporta, one of Valencia’s worst-hit towns, as workers chanted: “Go away!” “Pedro Sanchez, where are you?” and “Murderers!”

The unions said: “Without prejudice to the responsibilities associated with each level of government, the priority at this time is to unite all efforts to address the emergency.”

As anger continued to mount and hundreds of thousands of workers and their families organized for rescue and cleanup efforts, unions sponsored a pathetic 10-minute nationwide work stoppage last Friday. It was organized in collaboration with the CEOE platform for large companies, the same entrepreneurs who forced their employees to stay at their workplace during the floods.

The next day on Saturday they refused to support a mass demonstration in which more than 130,000 people took part. However, they suspended a planned strike in the road transport sector, claiming that transport services could not be suspended during the recovery period. That is, it is good to suspend strikes after a disaster, but not when transport and logistics workers are drowning in floods.