"The committee is still locked up and will continue to be locked up." This is the threat launched yesterday by the strike committee of Justice officials, who on Wednesday night occupied a unit of that ministry and stayed to sleep there after abruptly ending the meeting they had with the Secretary of Justice throughout the day. State of Justice, Antonio Tontxu Rodríguez.
That strike committee has made it clear that it has no intention of putting an end to this confinement if the Government does not change the interlocutor chosen for these negotiations. They demand a salary increase of up to 430 euros gross per month.
One thing is clear in this latest protest at the headquarters of Justice. The tension between the opposing parties is much greater than that experienced in the negotiations with judges and prosecutors to avoid their threat of a strike and a greater intensity is also noted -at this time- than that registered with the long negotiation with the administration's lawyers of Justice.
The meeting on Wednesday was a fiasco and ended abruptly when the government refused, the officials maintain, to make an economic offer with the excuse that they had to wait for the 23-J elections to resume that negotiation.
Javier Jordán de Urríes, CSIF's national president of Justice, affirmed that the solution to the conflict is now in the hands of Pedro Sánchez, "who we hope will take the baton and name valid interlocutors because those named so far are no longer valid for us." The unions assure that both the Minister of Justice and the Secretary of State would like this strike to die under its own weight, but warn that this will not happen because "civil servants have dignity."
