ASTURIAN MINERS DOWN TOOLS
PARIS, May 8 -- More than three- ~quarters of the 65,000 miners in Asturias were reported on strike today in the fourth creat action they have undertaken since 1962 in defiance of Spaints fascist laws banning strikes, Some 5,000 Oviedo metal workers walked out in a solidarity demonstration,
THe acting head of the government-sponsored "union" gaid May 6 that the strikes had ha “yorecipitated by political forces with subversive intentions,
Police and civil guards were reported to have been ordered to stand by; but up to the moment no repressive action had been taken,
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The strike wave appears to have been precipitated by an announcement at a mine of a-ten=-day shut-down in retaliation against strike action for better protection against silicosis,
Sympathy strikes then flared at several mines, Management's response was to suspend the strikers for fifteen days as punishment.
The answer to that was fresh sympathy strikes, In this. way the action began to snowball in what appeared to be almost spontaneous fashion,
Said the Madrid correspondent of the London Times (May 7]: “The rapid spread of the strike since Monday implies an extraordinary demonstration of solidarity, with a mingling of economic and political claims." f .
José Antonio Novais, the Madrid correspondent of the Paris daily Le Monde, agreed that it was a solidarity movement, but said that "this movement has a deeper cause: the miners are dissatisfied because the government has not yet published the new regulations for the coal pits." :
He added that the antistrike legislation now appears to block adjustment of the dispute. "The government, having transformed the most peaceful of labor problems into a conflict with the public order, it is difficult for it to negotiate, because of the involvement of public authority, with those who are 'outside the law,!'"
What is happening fundamentally in Spain now is a growth in strength of the real union movement, The strikes are not only over immediate demands involving working conditions and wages but over the fundamental issue of the right to organize free unions. Even though this is not opanlystated, it is implied by the spontaneous action and its tendency to set off a chain reaction,
7 As Ramén Vazquez pointed out in a World Outlook article [May 1], the Spanish workers in the past two years have succeeded in reforging the strike weapon as a means of struggle, utilizing it effectively against the capitalists. and the government, andfinally compelling the powers that be to recognize the existence of strikes, Now the workers have taken up a new objective, the winning of trade+union freedom in struggle against the Felangist "unions,"
The heroic Asturian miners have’ served notice that. they mean business, The further course of this struggle will be observed by vanguard workers throughout the world with the keenest interest and sympathy. Will their strike repeat the pattern of the movement that started in Asturias in April 1962? That strike spread in a few weeks to important industrial centers, including Barcelona, and gave Franco the worst Ilnbor crisis since he shot his way to power.
moe