Spanish State: Exploitation of the proletariat
Featured image: increase of the sick leaves in the Spanish State. Source: Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations.
We hereby publish a resume of an article published by Servir al Pueblo. All the translations of the excerpts are unofficial.
Servir al Pueblo reports on an increase in the sick leaves and deadly work accidents in the Spanish State. According to this newspaper “sick leaves due to common illness has doubled in a decade.” Because of the way in which the State is exposing the data, “The work accidents have increased, but only a very small quantity are recognized as such.” The Spanish State has just created difficulties to recognize the work accidents. It is just likely to happen if the work accident was very serious and obvious. But when it is not so obvious, such as mental illness, general physical discomfort, etc., it is not recorded by the institutions as a consequence of work, but just as a common illness of the worker and without relation with exploitation.
The medical services are entirely at the service of the interests of the bourgeoisie. Servir al Pueblo explains that “The person who has to verify if the sick leave is the result of a work accident is the work doctor on the company’s staff (internal medical service) or the mutual insurance company (external medical service). In any case, who pays is who rules. The mutual insurance company is at the service of the bosses. Companies select the mutual insurance companies that recognize the lowest quantity of work accidents, because they save relatively significant money.” Thus the doctors become “true mercenaries of the bosses.”
That’s not all, but the State also complicates the internal procedures in order to complicate the proletariat to claim the damages faced due to the work conditions. Regarding the illness the working class faces because of the exploitation it faces, Servir al Pueblo explains: “The problem of work diseases is not a health problem, but a labor problem, a problem derived from class struggle, it is a problem of exploitation of the proletariat. It is obvious when one sees that the list of occupational diseases is modified with a log procedure that does not correspond to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Labor!”
The number of workers killed by their jobs has also increased, within the last five years a 8 % more of deadly work accidents in the first six months of 2024 was recorded, the highest peak in that period. The biggest number of work accidents is at the manufacturing industry, construction and vehicles reparation. Regarding the death toll, the highest number is in construction, transport and storage and manufacturing industry. The highest increase compared to 2023 was in construction with a 29.6 per cent more of dead work accidents.
Servir al Pueblo denounces that before this “devastating panorama, the union bureaucracy keeps its policy of becoming the firefighters of the bourgeoisie. They extinguish the fires wherever they are. Nothing done in the streets, everything at the offices. Nothing of social war, everything to social peace.”, and states that a “class-conscious line within the union movement to revert the situation and to do not lose ever the perspective of liberation of our class” is necessary.
