By Sarah Morris
MADRID (Reuters) - Thousands of Spanish workers were set to march in Madrid on Tuesday to protest against austerity measures they say put social spending at risk, as governments across Europe make cuts to stem the euro zone debt crisis.
Members of the disaffected Indignados youth movement were expected to join the trade union march to the central Puerta del Sol square, where unemployed young people camped out for weeks in May in protest at the political system.
"The prospect right now is workers who are apprentices until they are 33 and retire at 75," Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, secretary general of the CCOO labour federation, told a news conference, criticizing government labour market reforms such as gradually raising the retirement age.
Youth unemployment tops 40 percent in Spain and one in five workers are jobless, the highest rate in the European Union.
The Madrid march is organised by Spain's two main unions, the CCOO and UGT, and comes on the same day as workers across Italy staged strikes in protest against government austerity plans being debated by the Senate.
Italy and Spain both agreed last month to enact tougher austerity measures in return for support from the European Central Bank in buying their sovereign bonds to ease fierce market pressure on their borrowing costs.
Tuesday's march follows others organised last week by the Indignados -- or Indignant -- and comes a day before Spain's Senate votes to reform the constitution to limit structural deficits at the central and regional governments.
CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM
The reform is likely to pass as both the governing Socialists and the centre-right opposition People's Party, favourite to win a November 20 general election, are in favour and the lower house has already overwhelmingly approved it.
Union protests have had little influence on Spain's commitment to austerity measures and a general strike last year drew only limited participation.
Spain's two main political parties struck a rare political truce over the debt brake, arguing it is essential to show markets Spain is credible about its debt management. But smaller parties, such as the United Left and Catalan and Basque nationalists, object.
They say the reform breaks a parliamentary deal struck when Spain became a democracy in 1978 -- three years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco -- and they demand a referendum on what would be only the second change to the constitution since then.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero proposed the debt brake after a Franco-German summit urged all euro zone countries to adopt it as a measure to reassure markets.
Last month Spain's bond yields came perilously close to levels which forced Greece and others to ask for bailouts, and recovered only after a sustained campaign of ECB bond-buying.
Spain's deficit is at the heart of concerns that it may need a bailout like Greece, which has been plagued by social unrest over austerity measures.
Union leaders and the government in Spain sparred publicly ahead of the protest, with Toxo saying that Zapatero had warned him in August that the country was close to needing a bail-out. The union leader later said he had misspoken.
"A rescue is totally out of the question," Economy Minister Elena Salgado said on Tuesday.
She said the country's risk spread -- which measures the difference between interest rates on German and Spanish benchmark bonds on secondary markets -- should not be higher than 150 basis points based on economic fundamentals.
Spain's borrowing costs have soared since early 2010 and the spread was at roughly 340 basis points on Tuesday..
Spain has pledged to bring its headline public shortfall, one of the highest in the euro zone, down to 3 percent of gross domestic product by end-2013, in line with EU guidelines and expects to have cut it to about 6 percent of GDP at the end of this year from 11.1 percent in 2009.
(Writing by Fiona Ortiz; editing by Louise Ireland and Paul Taylor)
