Leaders from the labor unions UGT and CCOO held a meeting yesterday with King Juan Carlos of Spain as a follow up to talks held with Mariano Rajoy (July 26) and Angela Merkel (July 5). The talks with Merkel were kept secret.
The unions are trying to regain power that they lost during the last socialist party regime during which they opposed civil service wage cuts and pension freezes in spite of strikes held in September of 2010. Besides fighting against proposed cutbacks, the two labor union leaders took advantage of the media attention in order to tell the Monarchy that it wanted to hold a meeting to discuss how to rebuild Spain's political economy as developed by Mariano Rajoy and team. This was a rabble-raising request that only served to undermine a government that was democratically elected.
The proposal from Cándido Méndez and Ignacio Fernández Toxo was not only unnecessary, but also led to disastrous tactics employed by Greek labor unions, ultimately breaking the country socially and politically and nearly getting it kicked out of the EU. The stale reality that UGT and CCOO believe in (nearly 14,000 unions feeding off of state funding) does not justify their desire to mount tensions in a country that has made major efforts to implement hard but necessary reforms in
