They join the farmers and ask to paralyze the activity from this Monday
Platform for the defense of the national and international road freight transport sector, an organization of transport companies, has announced the call for a new indefinite strike in the sector.
This small employer association, which paralyzed a good part of economic activity in March 2022 throughout the country with a strike in the sector, still has to endorse this decision next Saturday, February 10, as announced at a press conference.
The Platform has taken advantage of the tensions in the agriculture sector, which began two weeks ago in France and have spread to the rest of Europe, to join these protests and have a greater impact.
In November 2022, this association threatened to call another lockout to repeat the success achieved a few months before, but on that occasion it did not manage to transcend and in just a few days it had to be suspended.
As in March 2022, this strike is called in a minority and outside the sector, represented in the National Road Transport Committee (CNTC), whose representatives have already distanced themselves from any current strike in the sector.
If the Platform endorses this decision next Saturday, the strikes will begin that same day, jointly with the so-called Platform 6F of Farmers and Ranchers.
However, the Platform has asked transporters to progressively paralyze their activity starting this Monday and “return home to end the week with the approval and availability of the endorsement in Madrid.”
“Until then, we ask for the collaboration of all colleagues in the transportation sector in the face of those circumstances that arise this week from farmers in their protests,” he said in a statement.
GOVERNMENT RESPONSE
The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, defended this Monday that any strike called by transporters in support of the agricultural sector would be “absolutely unjustified.”
Puente has indicated that his motivations “have nothing to do with the sector”, but rather “they have more to do with politics.” Therefore, if any association decides to join the mobilizations that farmers are currently promoting, which it considers to have “greater justification”, it will be “a decision that will be assumed by whoever makes it.”
For the minister, the transport sector at this time has “some reasons” to be “dissatisfied”, but also others “why it should not be”, which is why, he stressed, his department will observe “in enormous detail” “the decisions that are made in this regard.
