The indefinite strike of carriers, which has forced extensive police deployment, is taking its toll on the supply chain, threatening to become even more entrenched. For now, it has already caused chaos in supermarkets, with slaughterhouses without animals or fresh products that do not reach their destination, while the Government speaks of “boycott, violence and coercion.” The shortage of raw materials is a reality in various industries, which have been forced to stop working.
Now, taxi drivers and drivers of rental vehicles, ambulances and non-regular transport buses have also joined the protests. As well as fishermen’s brotherhoods throughout Spain, who have decreed three days without going out to sea to demand from the Government measures such as those of France to lower fuel prices.
No taxis or ambulances. The group of passenger transport by road (taxis, ambulances, buses) thus joins the protests that are leading other sectors related to the rise in energy prices and raw materials, including a part of the freight carriers, who carry more a week on indefinite unemployment. The National Taxi Association (Antaxi), Julio Sanz, considers that road passenger transport will have “serious problems to maintain itself” if the rise in energy prices continues.
Most of these unions criticize that in countries like Portugal they already have this aid and in others like France, it is approved and comes into force on April 1, so they appeal to the “political will of the Government to contribute to doing less bad this situation”.
up to the cranes. The last to join the strikes have been roadside towing companies. As of this week, 500 cranes and workshop vehicles will stop providing service due to rising costs “until the government gives them a solution.”
The fishermen stand and moor their boats. This ruinous week has led the fishing sector to moor the fleet in protest. To return to the sea, the fishermen demand that the Government put a solution on the table that urgently lowers the bill they are paying for fuel, which has tripled in just one year. “Either we have immediate, firm and forceful measures or the fishing sector is going to sink,” warned the National Federation of Fishermen’s Guilds.
The rise in fuel prices faced by the almost 9,000 boats registered in Spain, half of them in Galicia, is today more serious than the one they suffered in 2008 and which kept the fleet moored for a whole month. Then the sector considered it unaffordable to pay 0.60 euros per liter of diesel and now it is double that. 70% of the boats that have remained in port these days throughout Spain. Fuel has not been the only cost that has risen a lot lately for fishermen. Oils, ropes or nets have also done it.
Construction succumbs to logistical collapse. The lack of supplies such as concrete, ceramics, steel or wood forces companies to hang up their pallets. In the construction works there is little stock material, supplies are reduced. In the works there is a lack of concrete, wood, stone, ceramics, steel, wiring or paint. “If transport stops, there is nothing,” lamented the Pontevedra Builders Association (ACP). It is the trucks or the concrete mixers that feed materials, as the work progresses, to projects of all kinds of dimensions.
This sector thus joins sectors such as extractive fishing, cold logistics, the fish processing industry, canning, automotive, natural stone, dairy or metallurgy, forced to reduce gears to idle due to lack of supplies. Taking into account the level of affectation diagnosed by different business organizations, the war-strike combo has already shaken more than 30% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Galicia, with activities such as the manufacturing industry and the primary sectors at the head . And what remains to the rest of Spain.
Image: GTRES