Kicking Off: Cuts, Catalan and Conflict

I know, I know. I should write about turquoise seas, dramatic mountain landscapes, quaint old Mallorcans acting traditionally. I should use the “beautiful” word. I should consult only my tourism brochure thesaurus, litter my every sentence with superlatives. I know, I know.

“What me? Write about politics?” “Yea, as if you don’t”. Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who’s interested. But then I know I am not, as I correspond with those who make it clear that I am not alone. “It’s all going to kick off.” “No, it won’t kick off.” I wish I could share such optimism. It was a pessimistic view that had made me suggest it would kick off. It had been half-joking, but only where one of the rescue agencies was concerned. “The Royal Navy and Ryanair repatriating us all.” Pull the short straw and there would be O’Leary kicking you back down the steps if you dared to bring on excess baggage, your dearest possessions stashed inside a hurriedly-packed old suitcase.

Will it kick off? When will it kick off? What will be the starting-point for it to kick off? Or perhaps it already has in an as yet quiet way.

You can’t blame Bauzá and his government for some of it. These government public companies, for example; what on earth were they all doing? Four or five of them with IT included in their titles. Was it possible that they were duplicating information technology effort? Very likely. The Balearics Tourism Agency is to be combined with the Foundation for Sustainable Development after all. What will become of the foundation’s Jorge Campos? He’ll probably be kept on. He and Bauzá are chums.

Ninety-two of these companies are to go, along with 800 jobs. Shame for the workers, but what was the point of them? The point seemed to be that it cost over 100 million euros a year to employ them.

The unions are making noises, but then unions always make noises. They are threatening “permanent conflict” if the government doesn’t back down on its promise to get rid of the full-time union worker representatives in public administration. It won’t back down. Permanent conflict. Will it come? Has it arrived? Has the kicking-off started?

The university hasn’t got money to pay salaries. Its financial situation, poor anyway, has got worse. It’s short of 20 million of government cash. Its budget had already been cut by 12%. How much more can it lose? Students, always students, gave Bauzá a hard time when he put in an appearance, not just about money but also about the attacks on the use of Catalan. The Obra Cultural Balear is going to take the attacks on Catalan to Europe. Cuts and the language thing. They are a powerful cocktail.

The cuts have only just begun though. There need to be more. Without them, the pharmacists, still owed millions, the constructors, still owed millions, will strike or close or do whatever it takes to get their money from a government with no money.

Because there isn’t any money. Well, there’s some. Some lurking somewhere. In the nick of time, Palma town hall has found some to put into the coffers of the city’s transport service operator, so that wages can be paid. There had been a delay in payment. The workers protested at the town hall, as they have every right to. But what’s to become of Palma town hall? It needs to find 42.6 million euros to pay banks by the end of December. If it doesn’t, what then? It’ll scrape by somehow, only to fight a losing battle later. And remember that thing about the Palacio de Congresos being a bottomless pit. When, if, it is finished next year and is meant to be under Palma’s administration, there won’t be any money in the bottom of the pit to maintain it.

Things are falling apart. The centre cannot hold. The centre holds only in that central office of the Partido Popular is instructing the Balearic Government. Former President Antich, remember him, and none of this is of course any of his doing, has described Bauzá as being on the radical right, and it’s not a compliment. He has also said that the regional government is a subsidiary of central office. What’s that? I think I’ve been saying this. For some time. Give me back my line, Antich.

Is that when it really kicks off? After the national elections? Or what about at the start of November? All those unemployment queues at the end of the season. All those people snaking along the street, demanding their winter payment from the government. From a government with no money. They should get a job. Where? All the hotels are closed. The airlines have stopped running. Does it all really kick off before Christmas? And what of Christmas? Will it be cancelled?

I know, I know. I should write about turquoise seas, dramatic mountain landscapes. Lose myself and lose you in a land where the sun always shines. It was nice while it lasted.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Land Of Make Believe

I’d like to take you back in time. It was a time of the three-day week, unworkable governments that changed every few months, virtual national bankruptcy and massive union unrest. It was also a time of extremely long hair and flared jeans.

It was during this time that I was at university. In common with some others, it was a self-contained community, a campus. Some miles from the city, it operated under its own rules, a mini-state not immune to the wider world, but one in which a government existed together with forces of agitation and institutions bound up in sub-governments, committees, constitutions and rigged elections.

The forces of agitation were led by the students union, generally a collective of the far and less far left. Collegiate in make-up, the university had, in addition to the main union, eight union-ettes: student bodies for each college.

The government comprised university administrative bureaucrats and academics of various political colours. The lecturers had their own set-ups: the senior common rooms attached to the colleges, the more strident among their number being those who were well-known to Moscow and others who would have considered Enoch Powell a liberal.

The government practised a system of democracy in which there were innumerable committees and a senate. To the colleges were devolved responsibilities for this and that, while the colleges’ individual unions – the junior common rooms – mirrored precisely the make-up of the main union. There was a president, a vice-president for internal affairs, one for external affairs, a treasurer, and so on.

Union meetings were interminable gatherings often devoted to the minutiae of whether ultra vires payments for supporting the Shrewsbury 3 or the Iranian 91 were constitutional or not. They always were, because the union politburo would make sure that they were. The mini-me unions, the junior common rooms, would concern themselves less with matters of national or international agitprop and more with securing the compliance of the rank and file. Bread and circuses: free beer, rubbish music acts and weekly discos.

No one ever actually questioned whether this system was right or not. It just was. It existed within a make-believe world. The campus was like Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner island, with one major difference – dissent, if not actively encouraged, could not be repressed. The only time it was, on any scale, was at the end of a two-week occupation of the administration building. The university had the temerity to put up campus rents so that what were little more than peppercorn acquired some salt. In we all went, but after two weeks of less-than-hygienic conditions, it was a relief when plod crashed through a wall one night and carried us out. And plod were no doubt delighted at the overtime payments.

Quite what the occupation cost, heaven alone knows. But then money wasn’t really much object. The university, its students, its staff existed thanks largely to UK government and taxpayer beneficence. It was its own world, one in which politics were entirely divorced from real life. It was a land of make believe, a play thing for the mid-70s’ wizards of “Oz” magazine.

The point of all this is that Mallorcan and Spanish politics have a lot in common with those days. The make believe was that forged after Franco, a world of idealistic institutions, decentralisation, duplicated responsibilities, inhabited by all manner of political groups and parties, supported by the seemingly endless generosity of first Europe and then a Spanish state with little comprehension of control.

No one thought to really question this system. It was allowed to grow, but it has, despite some 36 years of being, not cast off the immaturities that were evident in university days. Now we have situations in which a union leader can insult a political party, as Lorenzo Bravo of the UGT has insulted the Partido Popular government, calling them pigs. Back in the day, plod were those, while anyone who wasn’t a card-carrying Trot was a fascist, and this, the fascist insult, is hurled around in all directions as well by the competing elements in the Castilian-Catalan argument.

The system is akin to that of the university. Governments embroiled in issues of questionable payments, the town halls and the Council of Mallorca mirrors of government, dealing in the bread and circuses of the fiestas with their booze, rubbish music acts and discos.

The days of bread and circuses are over, however. The money’s run out. Real life for Mallorca and Spain has started. The playing and the make believe have to stop. Whether they will, though, is questionable. Here come plod.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Union Bashing In A Balearics Style

Are the Balearics heading for a Thatcher moment? The enemy within given a sound man-bagging by the Iron Gentleman?

José Bauzá and his merry men are indulging in a spot of union bashing. This isn’t the end of the brothers’ power as we know it, but it might be the thin end of the industrial relations wedge. Where Bauzá leads (or is rather instructed by central office), so a Madrid newly coloured blue come November will follow.

It is becoming clearer why Bauzá has suddenly acquired an hirsute appearance. It is so he can look in the beard the likes of Cándido Mendez, the secretary-general of the UGT union. Mendez’s fierce grey number makes Bauzá’s designer accessory seem distinctly wimpish, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, which is to not shave and look as hard as possible when confronting the ferocious Mendez.

The Thatcher moment, not that it actually is a Thatcher moment (yet), involves union worker representatives in the public sector. The Balearic Government is eliminating 89 of these representatives, 31 in the health sector, 34 in education and 24 in general services, along with a fund which pays for them. There are two classes of worker representatives, and the ones affected by the government’s decision are those who, in effect, work full-time in their representative capacity.

As with much of anything of a political nature in the Balearics or Spain, there is a symbolic aspect to the worker representatives (found in both the public and private sectors), as they are an embodiment of workers’ rights in law and under the constitution. The concept was taken from what was an established model in European countries such as Germany once democracy came to Spain. Prior to this, industrial relations didn’t exist. There wasn’t much industry to speak of and what relations there were tended to be somewhat one-sided; a snivelling waiter would be hauled out of a bar and a decree from the Generalísimo, announcing a 10% pay cut, would be nailed to his head.

The unions are none too impressed by the decision, and you would hardly expect them to react otherwise. The UGT (general workers) is threatening to break off relations with the government; the CCOO union believes the decision is the fore-runner of far wider cuts in the public service. Both unions accuse Bauzá and his boys of acting unilaterally and undemocratically.

A problem for the unions is that José Public might well not share their concerns. The representatives are known as “liberados sindicales”, the liberado bit referring to the fact that they have been freed from their normal work. Yet the liberado tag has become something of a pejorative, as the function is seen as being a bit of a cushy number.

There is also a criticism that it observes a kind of Parkinson’s Law. Work doesn’t expand to fill available time, rather time expands to justify the work. And what is the work? This is another criticism, that the representative ends up indulging and supporting spurious worker grievances: Juan says that the new toilet paper in the factory loos has given him piles and so demands six months on the sick. This sort of thing.

This all said, the unions do have a legitimate beef. The government appears to have taken it upon itself to rip up an agreement dating back to 2006, and it did so at a meeting to which the unions were given a mere 24-hours notice. If Bauzá is wanting to appear to be playing the hard man, then he is succeeding, but at what price?

The government’s action cannot be seen as one it has taken by itself. It may have ignored the unions, but it was a decision almost certainly taken for it elsewhere: in Madrid by the Partido Popular central office. Almost exactly a year ago, the idea of reducing (or scrapping) the worker representatives was getting a good airing. In Madrid. The president of the community of Madrid, the PP’s Esperanza Aguirre, reckoned a reduction was a good idea, and so did the party’s leader Mariano Rajoy. The idea has been bubbling away ever since, and, as mentioned previously, what the PP plans nationally it will try out, thanks to the compliant Bauzá, in the Balearics.

The government will argue it’s all to do with saving money, but the actual saving is very small – a couple of hundred grand. The move is, therefore, political and political alone. It is also, in its own way, symbolic, and you don’t need to be an expert in politics or industrial relations to appreciate what it symbolises.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.