The second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, meets this Thursday in
New York
with the
Apple
and
Amazon unions,
exactly one year after Pedro Sánchez did so with the top managers of those companies to ask them to invest in
Spain.
"Probably the president's agenda last year and mine today are complementary," Díaz declared to the media when questioned about the different interlocutors that the government seems to have, among which, respectively, are the first (Apple) and the fifth (Amazon) companies in the world by market value.
For Díaz, "the president met with the companies; I am meeting with the new unionism."
In addition to the unions of Amazon and Apple, Díaz will meet with those of the Starbucks coffee chain, another company that has a presence in Spain.
That a deputy head of government meets with the unions of these three companies has enormous political significance.
In
the United States,
for a company facility to unionize, it is necessary for the workers to approve it in a referendum.
Next, a union is created in that workplace, to which, as a general rule, the entire workforce must pay contributions, regardless of who voted for or against its creation.
Finally, that union is integrated into one of the country's large centrals.
In the case of Amazon, the unions only affect its warehouses, and in the case of Apple and Starbucks, their stores and cafeterias, respectively.
The three companies have spared no effort to prevent their employees in those workplaces from creating their own centrals.
Apple has chosen to offer better working conditions.
Amazon, rather, by restrictive measures.
And in this last company there is a person who has become one of the stars of American unionism:
Derrick Palmer.
Palmer is a worker at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island, in the part of New York City that tourists never visit, who has campaigned, with the help of his partner
Christian Smalls,
to set up a hub.
Díaz is going to meet with him today, in a meeting for which the second vice president and Minister of Labor had shown great interest.
Apart from the meeting with the trade unionists, Diaz has, during his visit to the United States, an agenda marked by meetings with the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Today he has met with Senator
Bernie Sanders
, the only member of that chamber of the US Legislature who calls himself a "socialist."
Díaz declared herself delighted with her conversation with Sanders that she, she said, is, along with the one she had with Pope Francis, among the ones that have had the most impact on her of all the ones she has had in the Government.
This afternoon (night in Spain) she will meet with representative
Ilhan Omar,
one of the members of the so-called 'squad', that is, the group of young congresswomen, among whom is the very famous
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
.
Omar had been arrested on Tuesday for cutting off traffic in a protest against the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow states to ban abortion.
The vice president also met with the US Secretary of Labor,
Marty Walsh,
with whom she signed a document in which the US and Spain commit to moving forward along the path of improving labor rights.
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