For two months thousands of Spain’s coal miners have been on strike. They are fighting to stop the Spanish government’s plans to cut mining subsidies by 64 per cent, putting 30,000 jobs at risk.
They’ve taken their protest directly to the conservative government in Madrid and have been subjected to brutal [4] police repression, fighting back [5] with home-made rockets and dynamite.
Their dispute hinges, as do most at the moment, on austerity measures [6]. The Spanish government decided to cut the subsidy to the coal mining industry from 703 million euros ($853 million) to 253 million euros ($307 million). To put this in perspective, this amounts to 0.45 per cent of the 100 billion euro ($121 billion) bailout for Spanish banks agreed last week.