• Foreign Affairs More than a month of strike by Spanish labor personnel in the United Kingdom: "The salary is not enough to live on"

  • Diplomacy Employees of Spanish consulates in the United Kingdom reduce their strike after negotiating with Foreign Affairs

The protests of the labor personnel in the embassies and the consulates take root in more countries.

Although the Foreign Ministry launched a specialized committee to negotiate with the workers of the United Kingdom, the agreements reached have not come into force and the rest of the embassies continue to be on the verge of collapse, according to the workers.

Weekly stoppages have already spread to foreign service agencies in Belgium,

the Netherlands

and Australia.

The workers of the Netherlands will hold concentrations at two in the afternoon for half an hour, every Monday, in front of their workplaces.

The regions that have joined this strike denounce the low wages resulting from the 13-year freeze and the low quality of working conditions.

They are the same reasons for which their colleagues in the United Kingdom protest.

From Australia they have already published a statement through Twitter in which they collect this series of reasons.

In the statement, in addition, they demand that an increase in pension contributions be made to compensate for the years of frozen wages and the lack of an agreement with Social Security that allows them access to a Health model equivalent to that of Spain.

They warn that if their demands are not met, "they will return to the path of conflict."

The waves of denunciation and mobilization of the workforce in Australia began in 2017, at the same time as in Argentina.

However, the demonstrations and the indefinite strikes did not make Foreign Affairs take into account any of the requirements they were asking for.

Marcos Redondo

, Officer of the

Sydney

Consulate , has been in charge of the foreign service of the Spanish in Australia for 20 years and assures that in 2017 they reached the country's minimum wage.

"We got to charge an Australian dollar more per hour than a

McDonalds

worker ."

In December of last year, the

CSIF

union sent a letter to the Australian ambassador in Spain, in an attempt to get the Australian institutions to mediate in the conflict.

The organization informed the ambassador that "workers' wages have once again been placed below the legal minimum wage for the fifth consecutive year."

The situation is similar to that experienced by the workforce in the United Kingdom.

The workers cannot face the price of the rents, they emphasize.

Redondo points out that "90% of the workforce was lost because they retire or leave, they cannot resist living in these conditions."

"There are those who have a second job and those who, at the age of 40, have had to return to Spain to live with their parents."

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