In This Article
Spanish workers walked out on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, in the country’s first general strike in fourteen years, turning a long-running argument about the cost of a home into the loudest event of a snap election campaign that has less than three weeks left to run. The stoppage, called by Spain’s two largest trade unions and backed by tenants’ associations, ran for twenty-four hours from midnight, and it brought picket lines to factories, depots and public squares in wet and stormy weather, with transport running on reduced timetables and many workplaces quiet for the day. The grievance at the centre of it is simple to state and hard to solve: rents have climbed so fast that the average monthly rent now takes almost everything a young worker earns, and the country is short hundreds of thousands of homes, a gap the central bank expects to pass a million within two years. The unions say the strike is about decent jobs, living wages and decent housing together, and they have tied the housing crisis to the wider cost of living, arguing that a pay rise means little if the rent takes it all. The timing is political as well as industrial. Spain votes in a snap general election on November 29, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is reported to hope that voter anger over housing will move the campaign away from corruption cases involving people close to him and away from a deadly train crash last month. This report sets out what happened on November 11, why the unions called the strike, what it cost and what it did not, and what comes next, drawing only on what the unions, the reporting of the day and the official figures said, and flagging clearly where the facts are still unconfirmed. The Spain general strike housing crisis November 2026 is the focus of this report.
1. A Country Stops Work
A general strike is the rarest instrument in a trade union’s armoury, and Spain had not used one for fourteen years when the call went out for November 11. The last time Spanish workers stopped work across the whole country was in 2014, during the eurozone debt crisis, when the target was austerity. This time the target was different: not a government budget, but the price of a roof. The strike was called for a full twenty-four hours, from midnight on Tuesday night into Wednesday night, and it was organised as a national stoppage, with workers in every region invited to take part rather than a single sector or a single city. The scale of the call was the first thing that marked it out. Spain’s two largest unions, the UGT and the CCOO, put their names to it jointly, and the two together represent more than a million workers. Behind them stood a wider coalition: the CGT, the CIG, the ELA and the LAB, along with tenants’ associations that have been campaigning for years against rising rents and evictions. That breadth mattered, because a general strike only works if it reaches beyond the organised workplace and into the street, and the organisers built the day around that idea, with pickets at dawn, marches in the afternoon and rallies in city centres in the evening. The weather did not help them. Storms moved across much of the country on the day, and the pickets stood in the rain, but the reporting from Madrid and other cities described lines forming anyway, with workers holding banners in the wet and chanting outside depots and factories. A strike in bad weather is a test of resolve, and the unions had planned for it: the point was not comfort, but visibility, and a wet picket line in front of a closed depot is visible in a way that a press release is not. By the end of the day the question was not whether the strike had happened — it plainly had — but how much of the country had stopped, and what, if anything, the government would do in response before the election.
1.1 Picket lines in stormy weather
The image of the day, as reported from Madrid, was workers standing in the rain. Spain was hit by stormy weather on November 11, and the picket lines formed in it anyway, with union members turning out at factory gates, bus depots and logistics hubs from the early hours. The reporting described pickets enduring the weather rather than being beaten by it, and that detail matters, because a general strike is partly a piece of theatre: the picket line is where the strike becomes visible to people who are not taking part, and a line that holds in the rain sends a different message from one that melts away. The unions had called the strike for the middle of November knowing the weather could turn, and the turnout in the wet became part of the story the organisers told about the day. In Madrid, the capital, the pickets were reported at transport depots and in front of workplaces across the city, and the marches that followed in the afternoon drew crowds through the centre. The same pattern was reported in other cities, with local unions organising their own pickets and rallies, and the tenants’ associations adding their own presence, carrying banners about rents and evictions alongside the union flags. The storm also had a practical effect: it made the disruption harder to measure, because some services were already affected by the weather before the strike began, and it gave both sides something to argue about afterwards, with the unions saying the turnout proved the depth of the anger and the government and employers saying the impact was limited. What could be said with confidence on the night of November 11 was that the pickets had formed, that they had held through the weather, and that the day had been visibly different from an ordinary Wednesday in cities across the country.
1.2 A strike that began at midnight
The strike began at midnight, and the first workers to stop were those on the night shift. That is the usual pattern for a twenty-four-hour general strike: the stoppage starts with the first shift of the day, which for round-the-clock workplaces means the shift that begins on the night before, and it runs through to midnight the following night. The call was for a full day, and the unions framed it as a complete stoppage rather than a partial one, asking workers in every sector to stay away from work for the whole twenty-four hours. That framing matters, because a general strike is not a strike by one industry: it is a call to the whole workforce, and its strength depends on how many different kinds of workers answer it. The UGT and CCOO, as the two largest unions, were the ones who could make that call credibly, and the smaller unions that backed them — the CGT, the CIG, the ELA and the LAB — extended the reach into workplaces where the big two are weaker. The tenants’ associations added a different kind of reach, bringing in people whose grievance is not with an employer but with a landlord, and whose presence on the picket lines turned an industrial dispute into a broader social protest. The midnight start also set the rhythm of the day: the night-shift pickets first, then the morning rush hour with reduced transport, then the marches in the afternoon, and finally the rallies in the evening, after which the strike wound down at midnight and the country returned to work on Thursday. That rhythm is deliberate, and it is designed to make the strike felt in stages, from the empty depot at dawn to the crowded square at dusk.
2. The Housing Crisis Behind the Walkout
The strike was called over housing, and the numbers behind that choice are stark. Spain has a housing shortage that the central bank puts at about 750,000 homes, and the same estimate says the gap is set to grow to more than a million by 2028. That is not a small shortfall in a single city: it is a national deficit, and it means that demand for homes is running far ahead of supply, pushing prices up and pushing people out. The shortage has built up over years, as construction slowed after the financial crisis and never fully recovered, while demand kept growing, especially in the big cities and on the coast. The result is a market in which rents rise faster than wages, and in which the people who feel it most are the young, who are trying to leave home for the first time, and the low-paid, who have the least room to absorb a rise. The unions’ argument is that this is not a private misfortune but a public failure, and that the state has a duty to act on it, by building more homes, by controlling rents, and by protecting tenants from eviction. The tenants’ associations that backed the strike make the same argument from the other side of the front door: they say that rising rents and the threat of eviction have become the defining pressure on household budgets, and that a wage rise that is swallowed by the rent is no rise at all. The strike was the moment when that argument moved from the meeting room to the street, and the unions chose housing as the headline grievance precisely because it is the one that reaches the most people. A pay dispute affects the workers in one company; a housing crisis affects everyone who pays rent, and that is a much larger crowd.
2.1 Rents that swallow a young salary
The single figure that explains the strike better than any other comes from the Youth Council of Spain, which says the average monthly rent has reached 1,176 euros, and that this is nearly 99 percent of a young person’s average salary. Put plainly, a young worker earning an average wage would need almost everything they earn to pay the rent alone, leaving almost nothing for food, transport, bills or anything else. That is the kind of figure that stops a conversation, because it makes the problem impossible to dismiss as a matter of budgeting or choice. It is not that young people are spending too much: it is that the arithmetic does not work. A rent that takes 99 percent of a salary is not a cost of living; it is a barrier to living independently at all. The figure also explains why the strike drew in tenants’ associations alongside the unions: the people most squeezed by rents are often the same people who are least protected at work, and the two pressures feed each other. A young worker on a low wage cannot afford a home, and a young worker without a secure home cannot build a stable working life. The Youth Council’s figure is an average, and averages hide wide variation — rents are higher in Madrid and Barcelona than in smaller towns, and some young people earn more than the average — but the direction of the figure is what matters, and it points to a market in which housing has become unaffordable for the generation trying to enter it. The unions used that figure as the moral centre of their case, and the tenants’ associations carried it onto the picket lines, because it turns an abstract debate about supply and demand into a concrete question: how is a young person supposed to live?
2.2 A deficit of homes
Behind the rents sits the shortage. The central bank’s estimate of a deficit of about 750,000 homes, growing to more than a million by 2028, is the structural fact that underpins the whole dispute. A deficit of that size does not appear overnight, and it does not disappear quickly either: homes take years to plan, approve and build, and the gap between demand and supply has been widening for a long time. Spain built far fewer homes after the financial crisis than it did before it, and the construction sector that once produced them shrank, taking skills and capacity with it. At the same time, demand kept rising, driven by population growth, by people moving to the cities for work, and by the growth of short-term rentals in tourist areas, which took homes out of the long-term market. The result is a squeeze that shows up first in rents and then in everything else: people stay longer in their parents’ homes, they share flats with strangers, they move further from work, and they spend more of their income on housing than any previous generation did. The unions’ demand, as framed in the strike call, is not only for higher wages but for a housing policy that closes the gap — more building, more social housing, and stronger protection for tenants. The central bank’s projection that the deficit will pass a million by 2028 gives that demand its urgency: if nothing changes, the problem gets worse every year, and the rent figure that already takes 99 percent of a young salary will keep climbing. The strike was, in that sense, a protest against a forecast as much as against a present fact, and the organisers made the forecast part of their case.
3. The Unions Behind the Call
The strike was called by the UGT and the CCOO, Spain’s two largest trade unions, and the fact that they acted together is itself significant. The two unions have different histories and different political traditions, and they do not always agree, but on November 11 they put their names to a single call, and they did so jointly, which gave the strike a weight that neither could have achieved alone. Together the two unions represent more than a million workers, and their joint call reached into workplaces across the country, from factories and warehouses to offices and public services. The decision to call a general strike is not taken lightly: it is the strongest tool a union has, and it is used sparingly, because it asks every member to sacrifice a day’s pay and because it only works if the turnout is visibly large. The two unions had been building towards the call for weeks, with the IUF, the international food and allied workers’ federation, reporting on November 9 that the strike had been jointly called for November 11, and that it would be the first in fourteen years. The European regional organisation, EFFAT, added its support, and a resolution from its executive committee meeting on November 4 and 5 backed affiliates taking to the streets across Europe to demand action on the cost of living, fair wages, workers’ rights and properly funded public services. That international backing mattered, because it placed the Spanish strike in a wider European argument about wages and living standards, and it signalled that the unions saw their dispute as part of a shared problem rather than a purely Spanish one.
3.1 UGT and CCOO, together
The UGT, the General Union of Workers, and the CCOO, the Workers’ Commissions, are the two pillars of Spanish trade unionism, and their joint call for November 11 was the product of months of coordination. The two unions have often worked together on national campaigns, but a general strike requires a level of agreement that goes beyond a shared press release: it needs a common set of demands, a common date, and a common plan for the day, and it needs both organisations to commit their members and their resources to the same action. The demands they settled on link housing to wages and working conditions, and that linkage is deliberate. The unions argue that a pay rise is meaningless if the rent takes it, and that decent housing is a working condition in the same way that a safe workplace is. That framing lets the strike speak to workers whose wages have not kept up with prices, and to tenants whose rents have risen faster than their pay, and it brings the two groups together under a single banner. The joint call also had a practical purpose: a general strike called by one union alone can look like a sectional protest, but a call from the two largest unions together looks like a national one, and that is what the organisers wanted the government and the public to see. The reporting on the day described the two unions’ flags flying side by side on the picket lines and in the marches, and that image, repeated across the country, was the point of the exercise.
3.2 Tenants join the picket lines
The most distinctive feature of the November 11 strike was who stood alongside the unions. Tenants’ associations, which campaign against rising rents and evictions, backed the call and took part in the day, and their presence changed the character of the protest. A traditional general strike is a workers’ protest, organised through workplaces and aimed at employers and the government. This one was also a tenants’ protest, organised through neighbourhoods and housing blocks, and aimed at landlords and the housing market. The tenants’ associations brought a different kind of grievance to the picket lines: not a dispute over pay or hours, but a dispute over the right to a home that does not swallow a whole salary. Their involvement also widened the strike’s reach, because tenants are not organised through the workplace, and their associations could mobilise people who would not otherwise have been part of a union action. The smaller unions that backed the call — the CGT, the CIG, the ELA and the LAB — added their own reach, particularly in regions and sectors where the two big unions are less strong, and the combination of big unions, small unions and tenants’ groups gave the day a breadth that a purely industrial stoppage would not have had. The unions’ own framing of the strike, as reported before the day, made this breadth explicit: the call was for good jobs, living wages and decent housing together, and the tenants’ associations were named as partners in that demand, not as bystanders. That partnership is likely to be the lasting feature of the day, whatever the immediate outcome, because it ties the housing movement to the labour movement in a way that could shape future campaigns.
4. What Ran and What Did Not
A general strike is measured by what stops, and on November 11 the disruption was real but partial, because Spain, like most European countries, sets minimum services for a strike day. Minimum services are the skeleton of public transport and essential services that must keep running even during a stoppage, so that hospitals can be reached, airports do not strand passengers, and the country does not grind to a complete halt. The government and the unions agree the levels in advance, and the figures are published before the day, so that people know what to expect. For November 11, the minimum services meant that airports stayed open, but only part of the flight schedule was protected, and trains, metros and buses ran on reduced timetables. That is the normal pattern for a Spanish general strike, and it means the day feels different rather than empty: the trains run, but less often; the buses come, but with longer waits; the flights go, but some are cancelled. The reporting on the day described that pattern, with commuters facing thinner services and longer journeys, and with the disruption concentrated in the morning rush hour, when the reduced timetables were felt most sharply. The unions, for their part, present minimum services as a compromise that lets the strike be felt without endangering public safety, while critics of strikes argue that the levels are set too low to allow a genuine stoppage. Both arguments were heard on November 11, and the truth, as usual, lay somewhere in between: the country did not stop entirely, but it did not run normally either, and the gap between the two was the measure of the day.
4.1 Trains, metros and buses
Public transport was the most visible casualty of the day. Trains, metros and buses all ran on reduced timetables under the minimum-services rules, and the reporting before the strike set out what that would mean: fewer trains on the main lines, fewer metro services in the big cities, and fewer buses on the streets, with the cuts deepest at the busiest times. The rail network was affected across the country, with the national operator and the regional services running a skeleton service, and the metro systems in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities operating with longer intervals between trains. Buses, which carry the most passengers in many cities, were also reduced, and the combination left commuters waiting longer and travelling in more crowded vehicles. The minimum-service figures for transport were reported on November 8 and 9, after an initial delay in setting them, and the reporting at the time noted that the figures should be treated as approximate, because the transport ministry’s own notice could not be found and the numbers came from press reporting rather than an official publication. That caveat matters, because the exact percentages of services that ran on the day are not yet confirmed in the sources available for this report, and the final picture will only emerge when the operators publish their own figures. What can be said is that the transport disruption was real and widely felt, that it followed the pattern of a Spanish general strike, and that it was the part of the day most people experienced directly, whether or not they took part in the strike themselves.
4.2 Airports, schools and hospitals
Airports stayed open on November 11, but only part of the flight schedule was protected under the minimum-services rules, which meant that some flights were cancelled and others ran as normal. The airports themselves did not close, and the reporting before the day stressed that they would remain open, but passengers were warned to check their flights, because the protected schedule covered only a proportion of the usual services. Schools and hospitals were also affected, though in different ways. Schools, which depend on teachers and support staff, saw closures and reduced staffing in many areas, and parents were warned in advance that classes might not run normally. Hospitals, by contrast, are covered by the strictest minimum-services rules, because lives depend on them, and emergency care continued throughout the day, with only non-urgent services reduced. The distinction is important: a general strike does not close a hospital, and the unions and the government agree in advance that emergency services must be protected. The same principle applies to other essential services, from water and power to the emergency services themselves, and the minimum-services agreement is designed to draw a line between disruption and danger. The reporting on the day did not suggest that line was crossed, and the disruption, while real, stayed within the framework the two sides had agreed. That is the normal outcome of a Spanish general strike, and it is why the argument afterwards is usually about how many people took part, rather than about whether essential services failed.
5. Sánchez and the November 29 Election
The strike did not happen in a vacuum. It happened eighteen days before a snap general election, and that timing shaped everything about it, from the demands to the coverage. Spain votes on November 29, 2026, and the campaign is already under way, with the housing crisis emerging as one of the central issues. The unions chose their date deliberately: a general strike less than three weeks before an election is a way of forcing the issue onto the agenda, and of making every party answer the question of what it would do about rents and the housing shortage. The reporting on the strike made that connection explicit, describing the walkout as a protest against the housing affordability crisis less than three weeks before the vote, and noting that the prime minister hopes to harness voter resentment over housing to his own advantage. Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, leads a government that has been under pressure on several fronts, and the housing issue offers him a way to change the subject. The unions’ demands — more homes, stronger tenant protection, living wages — are ones the government can at least partly embrace, and a campaign fought on housing is a campaign fought on ground that favours the left, because it is an issue where the government’s opponents have fewer easy answers. Whether that calculation works will only be known on November 29, and the strike itself does not settle it, but the timing of the walkout made the connection unavoidable, and every party in the campaign will now have to say what it would do about the 750,000-home deficit and the rents that swallow a young salary.
5.1 A snap vote less than three weeks away
The November 29 election is a snap vote, called ahead of schedule, and it has compressed the campaign into a short, intense period. The unions’ decision to strike on November 11, with eighteen days to go, was a deliberate intervention in that campaign, and it was designed to make housing the issue that voters think about when they go to the polls. A general strike is a blunt instrument for a campaign, but it is an effective one, because it creates a day that cannot be ignored, and because it forces the parties to respond to the demands behind it. The government’s response, as reported, was to present itself as the party that understands the housing problem, while the opposition was left to argue that the strike was a political act rather than an industrial one. Both positions were predictable, and both were heard on the day, but the deeper point is that the strike succeeded in its immediate aim: housing dominated the news on November 11, and the election campaign, which had been fought on other ground, was forced to engage with it. The unions’ calculation is that a voter who spends a day thinking about rents and evictions is a voter more likely to support the parties that promise action on housing, and the strike was the mechanism for making that happen. Whether the calculation is right is unconfirmed, and it will only be tested on November 29, but the strike’s timing shows that the organisers understood the campaign calendar and used it.
5.2 Corruption cases and a train crash
The reporting on the strike also noted what the prime minister hopes to move away from. Sánchez, according to the reporting, hopes to harness voter resentment over housing to shift the political narrative away from corruption cases involving his inner circle and away from a deadly train crash last month. That is a significant detail, because it shows how the strike fits into the wider politics of the campaign. Corruption cases involving people close to a prime minister are the kind of story that dominates a campaign and is hard to answer, because it raises questions about judgement and trust. A deadly train crash is a different kind of problem: it raises questions about safety, about investment in the rail network, and about whether the government did enough to prevent it. Both stories were already in the news before the strike, and both were working against the government. Housing, by contrast, is a story the government can tell on its own terms, because it can point to policies it has adopted and promises it has made, and because the opposition has its own record on the issue to defend. The strike, by putting housing at the centre of the day, gave the prime minister the narrative shift the reporting described, whether or not that was the unions’ intention. The unions’ own aims are separate from the government’s: they want action on housing, wages and working conditions, and they will judge the government by what it does, not by what it says. But the political effect of the strike, on the day, was to move the campaign’s attention, and that effect will be part of how November 11 is remembered.
6. Fourteen Years Since the Last General Strike
The last general strike in Spain was in 2014, and the gap of fourteen years is itself part of the story. General strikes are rare in Spain, and they are rarer still when they are called over a single issue rather than a whole programme of cuts. The 2014 strike was a response to austerity during the eurozone debt crisis, when the government was cutting public spending, freezing wages and raising taxes in an effort to bring down the deficit. The unions called the strike to protest against those cuts, and the day was framed as a defence of public services and living standards against a government that was, in the unions’ view, making ordinary people pay for a crisis they did not cause. The 2026 strike is different in its target but similar in its logic: the unions are again arguing that ordinary people are paying the price for a failure of policy, but this time the failure is a housing market that has become unaffordable, rather than a budget that has been cut. The fourteen-year gap also tells a story about Spanish trade unionism: the unions have spent the intervening years negotiating, campaigning and striking at sector level, but they have not called a national stoppage, and the decision to do so now signals that they believe the moment demands it. A general strike is a sign that normal channels have failed, and the unions’ willingness to use it after fourteen years is a measure of how seriously they take the housing crisis.
6.1 The 2014 walkout against austerity
The 2014 general strike was the last time Spanish workers stopped work across the country, and it was called against austerity measures imposed during the eurozone debt crisis. The context was a country in deep economic trouble: unemployment was above 25 percent, the government was cutting public spending to meet deficit targets set in Brussels, and wages were being frozen or cut in both the public and the private sector. The unions’ argument was that the austerity programme was making the crisis worse, by taking money out of the economy and pushing more people into poverty, and that the burden was falling unfairly on workers and the poor. The strike was part of a wider European wave of protest against austerity, with general strikes in several countries in the same period, and it was supported by the same two unions, the UGT and the CCOO, that called the 2026 stoppage. The 2014 strike did not end austerity — the government continued its programme — but it did mark a high point of opposition to it, and it became a reference point for the labour movement, a day when the whole country stopped and the government was forced to listen, even if it did not change course. The comparison with 2026 is instructive: the 2014 strike was about a government cutting spending, while the 2026 strike is about a market failing to provide homes, and the difference shows how the Spanish economy has changed in fourteen years, from a crisis of public debt to a crisis of private costs.
6.2 What has changed since then
Fourteen years is a long time, and much has changed in Spain since 2014. Unemployment, which was above 25 percent at the height of the crisis, has fallen substantially, and the economy has grown, but the benefits of that growth have not been shared evenly. Wages have risen more slowly than prices, and housing costs have risen faster than wages, which is why the housing crisis has become the central issue of 2026. The unions themselves have changed too: they have spent the intervening years rebuilding their membership and their influence, and they have adapted their demands to the new economy, with housing, precarious work and the cost of living taking the place of the austerity programme as the focus of their campaigns. The political landscape has also changed: the government that imposed austerity is gone, and the current government, led by Pedro Sánchez, is one the unions have often worked with rather than against, which makes the decision to strike against it all the more notable. A general strike against a government that is broadly sympathetic to the unions is a different kind of action from a strike against a hostile one, and it suggests that the unions believe the housing problem is too serious to be left to negotiation alone. The fourteen-year gap, in other words, is not just a measure of time: it is a measure of how much the issues have changed, and of how the unions have changed with them, from defending public services against cuts to demanding homes that people can afford.
7. The Numbers That Frame the Dispute
The dispute over housing is, at its heart, a dispute over numbers, and the figures that frame it are worth setting out plainly. The central bank’s estimate of a housing deficit of about 750,000 homes, rising to more than a million by 2028, is the structural number, and it explains why rents keep rising: when there are not enough homes, the price of the ones that exist goes up, and the people who lose out are those with the least to spend. The Youth Council’s figure — an average monthly rent of 1,176 euros, nearly 99 percent of a young person’s average salary — is the human number, and it explains why the strike resonated beyond the workplace: it turns an abstract shortage into a concrete impossibility, a rent that leaves nothing to live on. The unions’ own figure — more than a million workers represented by the UGT and CCOO together — is the organisational number, and it explains why the strike could be called at national scale. And the election date, November 29, is the political number, because it sets the deadline by which the parties must answer the unions’ demands. These numbers do not agree with each other, and they do not tell the whole story: averages hide variation, estimates are revised, and the final turnout of the strike is not yet confirmed in the sources available for this report. But together they frame the dispute, and they explain why the unions chose housing as the issue to strike over, why the strike was called when it was, and why the government will have to respond before the election.
7.1 Wages, rents and the cost of living
The link between wages and rents is the heart of the unions’ case, and it is worth spelling out. A wage is what a worker earns, and a rent is what a worker pays for a home, and when the rent rises faster than the wage, the worker gets poorer even if the wage goes up. That is what has happened in Spain, according to the unions and the tenants’ associations: wages have risen, but rents have risen faster, and the gap between the two has become the defining pressure on household budgets. The Youth Council’s figure makes the point in its starkest form, but the pattern is broader: across the country, the share of income spent on housing has risen, and the people who feel it most are those on low and middle incomes, who have the least room to absorb a rise. The cost of living adds to the pressure: food, energy and transport have all become more expensive, and a household that is already spending most of its income on rent has little left to absorb those rises. The unions’ demand for living wages is therefore tied directly to their demand for decent housing: a wage that does not cover the rent is not a living wage, and a housing policy that does not bring rents down is not a solution to the cost of living. The strike call, as framed by the unions and their international supporters, makes this link explicit, demanding good jobs, living wages and decent housing together, rather than treating them as separate issues. That framing is the intellectual core of the day, and it is why the strike was about more than a single pay claim: it was about the relationship between what people earn and what it costs to live.
7.2 What the unions are asking for
The unions’ demands, as set out in the strike call and in the supporting statements before the day, are for action on three fronts: jobs, wages and housing. On jobs, they want decent work — secure contracts, fair hours and proper protection for workers, rather than the precarious arrangements that have spread in recent years. On wages, they want living wages — pay that keeps up with the cost of living, rather than falling behind it. On housing, they want the government to act on the shortage and on rents, by building more homes, by expanding social housing, and by protecting tenants from eviction and from sudden rent rises. The specific policies behind those demands — how many homes, what kind of rent control, what form of tenant protection — are matters for negotiation, and the unions have not published a single, detailed programme in the sources available for this report, so the precise shape of their demands should be treated as unconfirmed in its detail. What is clear is the direction: the unions want the state to intervene in the housing market, rather than leaving it to supply and demand, and they want that intervention to be large enough to close the deficit the central bank has identified. The government, for its part, has already adopted some housing policies, and the campaign will be fought over whether those policies are enough, and over what more should be done. The strike was the unions’ way of saying that the current measures are not enough, and of putting their own demands on the table before the election, so that the voters can judge them.
8. What Happens Next
The strike is over, but the story is not. The first thing that happens next is already scheduled: a further twenty-four-hour rail strike is called for Tuesday, November 17, covering Adif, Renfe, Iryo and Ouigo, the companies that run Spain’s railways. That stoppage, if it goes ahead, will be a sector strike rather than a general one, focused on the railways, but it will keep the pressure on the government and on the transport network, and it will be watched closely as a measure of whether the unions’ momentum continues. Beyond the rail strike, the next milestone is the election on November 29, and the campaign will now have to answer the questions the strike raised: what will each party do about the housing deficit, about rents, and about the wages that are supposed to pay them? The unions will be watching the manifestos, and the tenants’ associations will be watching too, and the strike’s organisers have made it clear that November 11 was a warning, not a conclusion. Whether the government responds before the election, and what form that response takes, is unconfirmed, and the reporting available for this report does not say what, if anything, the government has promised since the strike. The final turnout of the strike, and the economic cost of the day, are also unconfirmed, and the figures that will settle those questions — from the unions, from the employers and from the government — have not yet been published in the sources available here. What can be said is that the strike happened, that it was the first in fourteen years, that it put housing at the centre of the election campaign, and that the issues behind it will not go away on November 29, whoever wins.
8.1 A rail strike on November 17
The rail strike called for November 17 is the immediate next step, and it deserves attention in its own right. It is a twenty-four-hour stoppage covering Adif, the infrastructure manager, Renfe, the national operator, and Iryo and Ouigo, the private operators that run high-speed services. A rail strike of that scope would affect long-distance and high-speed services as well as commuter trains, and it would come six days after the general strike, keeping the transport dispute in the news in the final fortnight of the campaign. The rail strike was called before the general strike took place, and it was reported on November 9, alongside the minimum-services arrangements for November 11, which suggests that the unions planned the two actions as a sequence: the general strike first, to make the national case, and the rail strike second, to keep the pressure on a specific sector. Whether the rail strike goes ahead as planned is not yet confirmed in the sources available for this report, and it is possible that negotiations between now and November 17 will change the picture, as often happens with scheduled strikes. But the call itself is a signal: the unions are not treating November 11 as a one-off, and they are prepared to keep acting until the election, and beyond it if necessary. The rail strike will also be a test of whether the momentum of the general strike carries over into a sector dispute, and whether the public, which tolerated the disruption of November 11, will tolerate a second stoppage six days later.
8.2 The Bottom Line
Spain stopped work on November 11 for the first time in fourteen years, and it did so over a question that affects almost everyone in the country: the price of a home. The strike was called by the country’s two largest unions, backed by smaller unions and by tenants’ associations, and it ran for twenty-four hours from midnight, with picket lines in stormy weather, reduced transport, and marches in cities across the country. The numbers behind it are stark — a housing deficit of about 750,000 homes, set to pass a million by 2028, and an average rent of 1,176 euros that takes nearly 99 percent of a young person’s average salary — and they explain why the unions chose housing as the issue to strike over, and why the strike resonated beyond the workplace. The timing, eighteen days before a snap election on November 29, made the strike a political event as well as an industrial one, and the reporting suggests the prime minister hopes the housing issue will shift the campaign away from corruption cases and a deadly train crash. Whether that hope is fulfilled, what the final turnout was, what the day cost, and what the government will do next are all unconfirmed, and the answers will emerge in the coming days, in the run-up to the rail strike on November 17 and the election on November 29. What is confirmed is that the strike happened, that it was the first general strike in fourteen years, and that it put the housing crisis at the centre of Spanish politics. The coming days will provide the answers.
