“Of course we see him a political motivation behind.” This was answered by the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to the claims made by the community firefighters, who demand an improvement of wages and a reduction of temporality. This is the last protest of public sector workers that the popular baroness reduces alleged conspiracies against him. Doctors called “union released” and university manifestations that, according to her, “politicize campus” They serve as arguments to the president to refuse to negotiate with social agents.
A month ago, the forest firefighters of the Community of Madrid mobilized to claim a salary increase and the stabilization of the workforce. With the agreement expired since 2008, both the regional administration and Tragsa, the state company that provides the service, eludes responsibilities. The 450 Forest Brigadistas of the community, with frozen salaries in the 1,3300 euros since 2010 and summer contracts, paralyzed the strike last week due to the complicated situation of the fire wave. Ayuso resorted to the mantra that he already used with the protests of teachers and doctors: unemployment and demands have a “political motivation behind” because working conditions in Madrid “are not even the worst of Spain.”
Last Wednesday, Ayuso celebrated in X The reform of the Statute of the Forest Reinforcement Brigades (BRIF) promoted by the Government to raise the salaries of state forest firefighters and maintain their positions during the winter. In fact, the regional president demanded that the Ministry did the same with the community firefighters, alluding to the contracting company, which is also Tragsa, is a public company. However, increasing the budget item dedicated to tragsa and adapting working conditions beyond the minimum established by law is an autonomous competence. No rule prevents the community from paying more to its forest firefighters, nor does it in the case of doctors or teachers, and that can only happen if the community increases the money destined to pay the contracting company.
With the fires, also those unleashed in Madrid, taking television hours and headlines in all media, this Friday the Ayuso government finally accepted to sit with the collective. At the meeting held at the Ministry of Environment, Tragsa and the unions that promoted the strike (UGT, Firet and CGT), the community proposed to the firefighters to accept the new state agreement that regulates the BRIF, a measure that the counselor, Carlos Novillo, defends as “perfectly legal” if the three parties agree. The Company Committee is valuing whether to continue the strike and wait for the next meeting, predictably next week, to assess the proposals.
Cuts and polarization
To the cuts of the usual public services in the governments of the PP, the contempt for the labor protests of the officials and, in the case of the Ayuso Autonomic Executive, represents a sign of its own identity based on different factors that explains the political scientist Carmen Lumbierres in conversation with conversation with conversation with elDiario.es. The usual political polarization in the speech of Ayuso, which materializes in slogans such as 'communism or freedom' or the confrontation of Madrid with the rest of Spain, applied to the management of the official strikes with a 'with me or against me', is a “division strategy and internal competition that makes it difficult to” the unity of protests and, therefore, the success of their claims.
On numerous occasions, the Madrid president has referred to the protests of public professionals as “political strikes”, thus disregarding their objective. On November 10, 2022, at the gates of the indefinite strike of primary care doctors, Ayuso accused the opposition in the Assembly, headed by Mónica García (more Madrid), of “mixing the need of doctors with political manipulation.” In turn, the vice president and spokesman of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ossorio, said that the conveners of the protests were “trying to burst the best health system in Spain” through “a political strike in the face of the proximity of an election.”
This repeated argument multiple times in the regional plenary served Ayuso to refuse to reach an agreement on salary improvements and reduction of temporality, which resulted in a series of enclosures and weekly concentrations by the toilets until the signing of a pre -agreement four months later. In October, the Ministry of Education broke, on the other hand, conversations with family doctors, with whom they had agreed to hold bimonnsual meetings to advance in the reduction of patient ratios and overbourocratization. “She handles the tempos and makes every assignment a hook to go back back,” says Lumbierres.
The reform of the agreement
Ayuso's denial to the labor demands of the public sector is a long -distance history. In fact, last month Madrid annulled a part of the last agreement of the officials signed in December because it considers that the restriction of the right to the protest it sought is “clearly exorbitant”, according to the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM).
The weak response of the public sector to this situation also has to do, according to Lumbierres, with a “normalization of the situation of precariousness maintained for so many decades” that has led to an “institutional fatigue” that, together with the current moment of social demobilization, favors the success of Ayuso's strategy against these claims of the officials.
In fact, the cuts and drowning of public services workers has as its ultimate end, since it generates a “distrust of public” by citizenship that, in the words of the expert, “sees privatization as a form of modernity.”
