[RiTa 538000 E6ЬLD Union leaders forced workers into…]

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RiTa 538000 E6ЬLD Union leaders forced workers into 'social contract' NEITHER the snowballing crisis of the bourgeois parties nor the role of the PSOE and the collapse of the CP can be fully understood without reference to the profound and seemingly unstoppahle worsening of the Spanish economy which has occured in the last few years.

If those tears of blood wept by the Virgin of San Juan de Dios in Granada were a new miracle, it is evident today that an old one has now passed beyond recall the famous Spanish economic miracle.

At the time of the Civil War in the late 1930s, Spain's economy was still very backward in relation to the rest of Europe. Two areas, Euzkadi (the Basque country and Catalonia, had undergone some industrialisation. But the economy of most of the country was still based on semi-feudal agriculture.

The first 15 years of Franco's dictatorship was an economic as well as a political dark age for Spain. The few industries declined, wages were cut in half and the country stagnated in almost complete isolation from the rest of the capitalist world.

Then suddenly in the mid-1950s this seemingly barren plant began to bloom. Spain's economy grew and industrialised at an astonishing rate.

Peasants and landless labourers left the land to migrate to new jobs in the towns or in the more developed countries of the rest of Europe.

A change in Franco's policies led to a huge inflow of foreign investment as well as a new upsurge of Spanish investment in response to new opportunities for quick profit. A fast rise in imports was Rates: £5 for three months, £8.75 for. six months, and f1 for a year.

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30%29%28%27% 26%1977 paid for by the growth of manufactured exports and the phenomenal rise of tourist spending. In the 1960s production grew at over 7% a year, a rate exceeded only by Japan.

Ironically, the economic miracle died at about the same time as the dictator.

Since the mid-1970s, Spain has not only shared in the general crisis of the world capitalist economies, it has fared a good deal worse. The factors which had previously been Spain's special advantages have boomeranged and become special disadvantages.

In the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s, labour Source: -OECD "78 '79 '80 '81 emigration was a safety valve needed even in an economy growing as rapidly as Spain. Now the crisis in the rest of Europe causes Spanish workers to be repatriated. So labour immigration became an extra source of pressure in a declining economy.

During the boom, Spain benefitted from the fact that tourism was one of the most rapidly growing areas of spending in Europe. Now, with the recession, tourism is one of the worst hit sectors of all.

Spain's miracle included massive construction boom associated with urbanisation and tourism. That too has collapsed, causing an exceptionally high concentration of business failures and unemployment in that sector.

Some idea of the severity of the Spanish crisis can be seen from the figures for firms taking "expedientes de crisis" - closures and sackings which the law protecting unemployment allows when firms are in financial straits.

Redundancies

In 1973 about 2,000 firms took such measures and they affected 75,000 workers. In 1979 (the latest year with complete figures available) 14,000 firms and 334,000 workers were involved (3% of the labour force). Everything suggests that the figures are much higher today.

Redundancies fuel unemployment trom one side while the return of immigrants, and the arrival of young people onto the labour market fuels it from the other.

The combined result has been a rapidly rising unemployment rate as a whole and an almost unbelievably rising level of jobless youth.

The overall Spanish rate of unemployment is now over 15%, the highest in Europe - over 2 million of a workforce of 11 million.

This is itself an underestimate since the size of the total labour force on which the figure is based has fallen in recent years despite population growth. 1½ million people have statistically "disappeared" from the workforce since 1976.

Jobs

That means many people are giving up even half-heartedly looking for jobs since there are none available.

This is, of course, especially true of women SaLe and so the official employment statistics disguise the extent to which women are being hit by the recession.

Even at ihe peak of the boom only 25% of women were regarded as participating in the labour force while now the figure is reduced to 20% (compared with 35% in Britain).

And even with this withdrawal from the statistical labour force adult women's unemployment is about one quarter higher than for men.

In reality the real overall unemployment rate in Spain today is almost certainly over 20%.

These shocking figures, however, pale in comparison with youth unemployment. In 1981 when the national unemployment rate was 14% the level for Age group 14-19 20-24 All ages teenagers (15-19) was 43%.

Today, probably three teenagers out of four are without work. And what is more, they have no prospect of getting work in the foreseeable future. Economic projections show that the rate of growth to make a significant dent in the unemployment figures are way beyond the rates previously hailed as miraculous. They must be deemed beyond the powers even of the Virgin of San Juan de Dios.

unemployment in Spain Unemployment rate Total Male 1974 1974 1981 43.4 28.3 14.3 Is there then a way out? So far the UCD government has taken the same kind of feeble steps to create artificial jobs as other capitalist states have taken. Youth unemployment schemes have been derisorily small.

The state has also propped up firms which would otherwise have collapsed. Partly as a result of this the Spanish budget deficit is currently running at over 4% of the national product. There is nothing very unusual about that since Italy's is twice that level. What is unusual is that over 80% of Spain's deficit is financed not by borrowing on the money market but by borrowing from the Bank of Spain -that is by just printing the money. Even in times of slump this method of finance has a tendency to be associated with rising inflation.

Recently ORES 1981 41.7 28.3 13.7 This week: the economy Spain has been relatively steady at about 14% - a few percentage points in practice above official predictions. That fact is a means of reducing real wages by getting the unions to accept a ntional wage norm to coincide with the predicted level of inflation. Union leaders forced workers a year ago into a national social contract which has kept wage rises down to under 11%. The other, forgotten clause of the social contract Female 1974 1981 45.7 28.4 16.0 committed the government to create 350,000 new jobs. In fact that is about the annual rate at which jobs are being destroyed.

There are now pressures, including accelerating devaluation of the peseta which make faster inflation seem likely and which seem destined to force the state deficit to soar further out of control as well as drain the foreign exchange reserves.

The deplorable economic situation is, of course, one of the reasons why the UCD has lost so much popularity and why it cannot hope to win another general election.

Does Spain have a coherent alternative economic strategy? The answer to that requires an examination of the workers' organisations especially the supposed victors of the forthcoming elections, the PSOE. These are the subjects of a subsequent article.

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Socialist Organiser 19 August 1982 Page 5 5.000 marched in Szczecin on August 10 in a funeral New demonstrations are planned in Poland on August 31. the second anniversary of the Gdansk agreements. The anniver- procession for the son and daughter-in-law of Solidarnose sary of the beginning of the Lenin shipyard strike - August leader Marian Jurczyk. (They had committed suicide). And 13 - was marked by demonstrations in Gdansk. Wroclaw and the biggest demonstration was on August 6, when thousands in the streets of Warsaw used the event of a religious pilgrimCracow, According to the press there were 10.000 on the age to make (despite all the Church's efforts to prevent this) streets in Gdansk. All the demonstrations were attacked by Marek Garztecki of the Solidarnose Trade Union ing Group in Britain believes that the next few weeks be very important in Poland. He explained why. a pro-Solidarnose demonstration.

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PUBLIC SECI PERCENTAGE OF GDP 1977 '78 79 80 81