The time has come to renegotiate. The ELA trade union, which represents the majority of the trade union representation, was sitting at the negotiating table for the last time on 17 May. The union wants to defend employment and, beyond that, wants to make public the services of the residences and to fundamentally change the care model in general. The workers have announced mobilisations in the absence of progress at the negotiating tables and the union has indicated that they have proposed cuts in the contents of the agreement and threatened to lay off the workers. The first of the protests took place on 25 June in front of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia. The union considers that the Provincial Council of Bizkaia is responsible for the service and criticises its attitude: “Instead of being concerned about the lack of progress in the negotiations and showing their concern, they are playing occult and have given ‘social’ priority to investing in a new Guggenheim.”

378 days of strike

The workers of the residences of Bizkaia made a total of 378 days of strike to sign the last agreement, almost all of them women. The labor and feminist struggle was very strong, especially in the streets of Bilbao and in the villages of Bizkaia. This strike brought the issue of the struggle and care of working women to the center of the media agenda. The Manu Robles Arangiz Institute of the ELA trade union, which led the strike, and ARGIA published in 2019 the account of that long struggle in the book Berdea da more berria.