Barcelona (EFE).- Doctors and teachers take to the streets this Wednesday to demand better wages and working conditions in the first major day of strike in Catalonia in 2023.
In addition, taxi drivers are starring in a four-hour stoppage against licenses for rental vehicles with drivers (VTC).
At a time when the Government is trying to close an agreement with the PSC to have budgets for 2023 and to be able to allocate more resources to social services, Catalonia will experience a day of various protests that, predictably, will result in circulation problems in Barcelona, empty classrooms and patients unable to be attended.
The Minister of Health, Manel Balcells, has not yet been able to close an agreement with the main medical union, Metges de Catalunya (MC), to call off the doctors’ strike this Wednesday and tomorrow Thursday, although the dialogue remains open in the face of power reconsider the partial strikes called for next week (February 1, 2 and 3).
The main stumbling block is in the remuneration improvements, which depend on some budgets of the Generalitat not yet closed, and the overload of work, before which the discrepancies on how to solve it remain.
This Wednesday will be the first day of the strike of the medical union -the first since 2018 in the primary and at a general level we must go back to the cuts of 2011-, to which some 25,000 physicians are called to participate, although yesterday it was already held a first day of strikes only called by a minority union and that had little follow-up.
The mobilization of the doctors has been taken advantage of by the main teachers’ union, Ustec, to call its own strike on the same days, in order to request more resources for schools and “shield” the month of July on vacation, after the unrest for the advancement of the start of the school year already applied last September in Catalonia.
street demonstrations
Ustec and the minority health personnel unions united in the Catalan Health Union Table will mobilize together in a march that will begin in the Sant Jaume square and end in the Parliament.
Metges de Catalunya, which was the first union to call a strike for these dates, has its own protest action, which consists of a demonstration that will begin at the Health Department and end at Sants Station.
Taxi drivers will block the Gran Vía
For its part, the collective of Barcelona taxi drivers has joined the protests with a four-hour strike in which they will cut off the Gran Vía to complain about the licenses for rental vehicles with drivers (VTC) still in force.
It will be a prelude to the strike called from January 31 to February 3, coinciding with the celebration in Barcelona of the largest audiovisual congress in the world, the ISE.
