By the second day of the road-haulage strike, Tuesday, the drivers who had gone on strike abandoned their efforts because there was no backing.
The large fruit & vega market, MercaGranada in the city had more police than pickets present Tuesday morning because many autonomous drivers, who said that they would back the strike, hadn’t turned up.
The union explained that the self-employed drivers had come back exhausted from Madrid on Monday and had decided to rest at home on Tuesday, which is why there were not many pickets outside MercaGranada.
Even on the first day, the National Platform in Defense of Road Transport, which had called the strike, decided to concentrate their efforts on organising a “massive” demonstration through the streets of Madrid, knowing that wider efforts were liable to fall flat. At the end of the day, the union put the figures at 10,000 whilst the Policía Local put the figure close to just 800.
Editorial comment: whilst you cannot fail to sympathise with the self-employed drivers who still find themselves working at a loss — something that the new law was supposed to prevent but has failed to do — it is with a sigh of relief that the whole distribution chain hasn’t ground to a halt, leading up to Christmas, as it did back in March, dealing a debilitating blow to a struggling economy emerging from the pandemic restrictions.
(News: Granada, Andalucia)