Me and the strike

I teach English to the admin staff of a shopping Centre in San Javier and today, the day of the General Strike, was one of my days there. I wondered if I may be faced with a picket line as the Unions had mentioned shopping centres as one of their targets. I'd decided not to cross it if there was one partly out of respect for my old Union boss, Jeff Brass (Stand thi ground lad, stand thi ground!) and partly because I've heard that Spanish pickets have a tendency towards violence. Jeff had a nice turn of phrase but Shakespeare's or Falstaff's "The better part of valour is discretion" seemed like sound advice too.

I didn't have to decide. No pickets. In fact the only way the strike affected me personally was that my regular newspaper wasn't on the news stand. I also saw a few placards passing down a street parallel to the one I was driving on.

It wasn't a washout though. Most of the heavy industry in Cartagena like the shipyards and the construction work on the new refinery closed down and there were no buses early on because of action by the pickets. Nationwide there seems to have been a fair bit of action.

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