LEAD: Portuguese stage general strike against spreading poverty

Nov 24, 2011, 11:40 GMT

Lisbon - Portuguese workers angry at the government's austerity policies Thursday joined a general strike, bringing public transport and other sectors to a partial standstill.

Trade union leader Manuel Carvalho da Silva said a 'very significant' number of people had heeded the call to strike. He described it as a 'warning' to a government following a 'logic of impoverishment' in its attempts to combat the economic crisis.

No official figures were immediately given on how many people had joined the strike.

Train and bus traffic was greatly reduced, the Lisbon underground was closed, and ferry traffic over the River Tagus came to a halt, according to media reports.

The Portuguese airline TAP cancelled 121 of its 140 scheduled flights, offering passengers alternative dates.

Rubbish collection came to a standstill in dozens of municipalities, according to union sources. Many hospitals only offered minimum services, while some schools remained closed. Police intervened against pickets in some places.

However, shops opened normally in central Lisbon and the country's second largest city Porto.

The 24-hour strike was called jointly by Portugal's two top trade union confederations, the communist CGTP and the Socialist UGT, to protest Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho's austerity policies.

Passos Coelho is trying to cut the budget deficit from 9.8 per cent of gross domestic product in 2010 to 4.5 per cent in 2012.

Parliament recently passed a budget slashing spending on health and education by about 10 per cent, cutting the earnings of many active and retired public employees by about one seventh annually, and lengthening the legal working hours by half an hour.

The policies follow guidelines agreed with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, which granted Portugal a bailout of 78 billion euros (105 billion dollars).

The austerity has come under widespread criticism in Portugal, where unemployment stands at about 12 per cent, the economy is mired in a recession, and poverty is spreading.

'It is vitally necessary to block the road that the country has taken,' CGTP leader Carvalho da Silva said.

On Wednesday, former president Mario Soares and other respected figures made public a manifesto urging leftist Portuguese to mobilize for 'social justice and the deepening of democracy as a way of fighting the (economic) crisis.'

'We cannot watch from the sidelines the escalation of the international financial anarchy and the dismantling of states, which endanger the survival of the EU,' the manifesto read.

Even President Anibal Cavaco Silva, who belongs to Passos Coelho's centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD), has criticized the government's austerity policies.

They were initiated by Passos Coelho's Socialist predecessor Jose Socrates, who resigned in June over parliament's rejection of his spending cuts.