Looks like I was overly paranoid yesterday… we left extra early to drop off the kids and took a back road to avoid some of the industrial polygons that seem favored by pickets. Looks like it was for nothing, since everything was deserted and traffic was great. So I thought maybe they all went to Barcelona, so I parked on the outskirts of Barcelona and walked to work instead of risking being anywhere near Diagonal.
The police had shut down Diagonal, but it was a total ghost zone. I finally saw a group of a about 20 protesters marching down Diagonal blowing whistles. I remember the last general strike we were standing on the office balcony seeing masses of people going by. This time we didn’t even hear anything except the occasional whistle.
The whole idea of a one day general strike is pretty dumb to begin with. Okay, you shut down the country for a day and then what? The point of a strike is that you strike until you get your conditions met.
The other pointlessness of the whole exercise is that the unions leading the strike are the lucky ones who are the most protected (and probably inefficient) workers of all in Spain. The real danger to the workers isn’t that they will get exploited by their management, but that the industries they work in will get shut down due to being uncompetitive.
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