Like the job that has prevented the coronavirus hit by moving home to become telework, May 1 is celebrated in 2020 without people on the street or speeches in the squares. Demonstrations starting promptly in the center of cities to enjoy in the later hours of a holiday are prohibited. Not even the UGT and CCOO union leaders , Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo , will be able to stand on the lectern in front of a crowd to launch a message demanding the government to repeal the labor reform.

The virus mandates that, as with the arrival of teleworking, contact should be through the screen today and this year it has been necessary to improvise. Union organizations have found a virtual plaza on social media where they can celebrate their # 1 deMayo by combining it with #quedateencasa.

Today, throughout the day the celebration will be at the house of each of those who participate and will be shared through audiovisual media, with a 12-hour agenda of events that starts with a press conference of the leaders of CCOO and UGT followed by speeches by Sordo and Álvarez in which the crowded background atmosphere with colleagues listening and applause that closes each point and apart will be replaced by a room in which the background on which they speak is a large canvas with the illustrated Puerta de Alcalá.

Security regulations imposed by the state of alarm have even prevented the speech from taking place outdoors in a year in which, although the work environment is more negative than ever, the social and economic crisis has given unions a protagonism that they lost since the financial crisis of 2008 and that they have not recovered until the arrival of Pedro Sánchez to the presidency of the Government. His participation in extending income protection measures to millions of Spaniards in the last month and a half has been decisive.

In addition, the organization of this May 1 is parallel to the negotiations that the unions hold open with employers and the Government to adapt the temporary employment regulation files (ERTE) that keep more than four million jobs on hold to the recovery of a economy that records a historical collapse. The last meeting, held yesterday, ended without an agreement, but both Álvarez and Sordo were yesterday in favor of extending these measures beyond the state of alarm. Álvarez pointed out that adaptation capacity will be necessary, because if not, "part of the effort will be wasted."

The union agenda for today also indicates that the party will be extended with several hours of concerts and a general applause at the same time in which the work carried out by health personnel in the last month is recognized from the balconies of all Spain. and a means to care for patients with coronavirus.

The social media resource thus offers the alternative that has saved the celebration of International Labor Day from the fate of other events that have been directly canceled. It also has, as unions know, a cross and it is the novelty that today, the street of social networks will not be entirely yours.

If in the traditional model there was no kind of counter-demonstration that could detract from the role of unions and their affiliates or generate any kind of tension, in social networks such as Twitter the model is radically the opposite, even to the current point of dissemination of anonymous hoaxes and stark ridicule . The organizations bear in mind that their speeches, their demonstrations and their staging will be discussed and must compete in noise with hashtags launched from other areas. The social struggle in the networks has new and very different rules.

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  • CCOO
  • UGT
  • Spain
  • Pedro Sánchez

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