The Suiza 6 face three and a half years each for protesting outside their workplace

Union branches across Spain have denounced the Supreme Court’s confirmation of prison sentences against six bakery workers for picketing. The workers were sentenced to three and a half years in prison and a fine of over 100,000 Euro. The workers at La Suiza bakery in Gijón took action to protest unpaid overtime and poor working conditions.

The judgement “equated informational pickets and concentrations of workers at the doors of a private business with coercion and threats”, said the CNT-AIT union in Grenada, warning that the case could set a dangerous precedent. According to the union, the sentencing shows the latent authoritarianism of Spain’s penal code, whose interpretation allows such prison sentences to be handed out at judges’ discretion. The CNT-AIT have called on Spain’s ruling centre-left coalition to repeal this repressive law, to no avail.

“We are talking about a union action of fourteen demonstrations without arrests, violence, or police charges”, said the workers’ lawyer Victoria Galán. “That is what is surprising, that the rallies are considered coercion and that the ruling makes business freedom prevail over union freedom, with the argument that it is annoying that if someone enters the bakery they are booed”. In the UK, recent minimum service laws similarly threaten workers’ ability to strike, with no indications of their repeal by the new Labour government.

~ Gabriel Fonten