General Strike is tomorrow

Tomorrow there is a nation-wide general strike against the PP government's labor reform law. When I hear General Strike I tend to think of the heyday of European socialism when they people believed they could crush capitalism once and for all if everyone just stopped working. I'm not completely clear on what is hoped to be achieved this time. The governing party won an absolute majority last fall and can basically do what they want, so I guess that this strike is pure protest. I was asking one Spanish person about this, and she rolled her eyes and said "yes, I know, we Spaniards do everything too late. If anything we should have protested last fall, before the election, because the PP said that they were going to put a labor reform into place if they won, and they won, so what did we expect?" As I see it, the government holds a kind of high ground; a pretty obvious rhetorical rebuttal would be to say something like, "this is a liberal constitutional system, and the proper way to voice your political views is through the ballot box, not by shutting down the country"-- but this is as far as I'm willing to go with talking about politics, because I'm only too aware of how annoying it is when people from other countries start with that.

General strike in Spanish = Huelga General

More importantly, in Galician = Folga Xeral

GENERAL STRIKE against the labor reform and the social pact. [Mini poster-within-a-poster:] "Mobilize yourself for the distribution of work and wealth." Social Justice - Public Services - Employment - Rights - Liberty.

These are lines from a poem, and I'm finding them hard to understand. Something like: "The rope that tempers the force of destiny broken, an entire people rebels within time-- general strike against history"

I doubt I'll be able to get to work tomorrow-- I doubt the buses will be running, or that they'll get picketed out or something. Maybe I'll go to the protest to see what it's like. On the other hand I don't know how enthusiastic I am about being the obvious foreigner with a camera.