Hundreds of docs, nurses, academics and taxi drivers took to the streets of Barcelona and different main Catalan cities on Wednesday, stating their poor working circumstances and low wages.
Barcelona noticed the protests of greater than 15,000 docs and nurses, in response to official figures, to keep away from, as they stated, the collapse of the area’s well being system.
A whole lot of taxi drivers additionally demonstrated within the Catalan capital in opposition to the regional authorities’s determination to approve extra private-hire driver licences (VTC), primarily for platforms corresponding to Cabify and Uber.
In the meantime, greater than 6,500 academics, which included civil servants, interim academics and training employees, demonstrated in Barcelona’s metropolis centre. The academics’ unions protested in opposition to the “excessive circumstances” of the general public training system and demanded the regional authorities make investments extra in it.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau of the left-wing get together Barcelona en Comú expressed her assist for the demonstrations and strikes.
“Public training and public well being are two pillars of a democratic society that doesn’t need to go away anybody behind,” she stated.
“That’s the reason our metropolis’s neighbourhood associations have traditionally been on the forefront of defending these companies, which should assure basic rights”, she added.
The protest comes at a time when the regional authorities is making an attempt to achieve an settlement with the Catalan Socialist Occasion (PSC) to have a price range for 2023. Allocating extra monetary sources to social companies is one in all its priorities.
The area’s Well being Minister Manel Balcells of the pro-independence ERC stated on Wednesday that the regional authorities is open to dialogue with the native physician’s union, Metges de Catalunya, to name off the strike.
The regional authorities has for years utilized ‘low value’ well being insurance policies and has continuously mistreated docs, in a well being system “dominated by managers educated in prestigious enterprise faculties”, in response to the union’s secretary-general, Xavier Lleonart.
Metges de Catalunya has referred to as for added strikes to be held from 1-3 February.
(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.EURACTIV.es)
