Strikes. A Comparative Study of Spain and Argentina

Abstract

Although strikes are the most widely used instrument in the defence of labour interests, their use in Spain has shown a downward general trend in the period 2016-2016. If we exclude the years when the financial-economic crisis was at its highest point, labour conflictuality—measured as number of strikes—went down again to numbers even smaller than those before the beginning of the crisis.

In this article, we analyse the trajectory followed by the number of strikes in Spain and Argentina in the period 2006-2016. The simultaneous analysis of the figures in both countries includes a set of variables which were defined based on the number of workers joining the strikes and the number of days that the participating workers were out of work. The results of our analysis show that, for all the variables included in it and, in particular, for the number of days out of work, the figures corresponding to the Argentinean workers were systematically much higher than those obtained by the Spanish workers. The goal of carrying out a comparative study of both countries was to identify elements of variation in the use of strikes as an instrument for protest.