Spain set for 1-day general strike

Police separate workers and pickets in Bilbao, where Basque unions began a two-day strike on Wednesday

SEVILLE, Spain (CNN) -- Spain is bracing for a general strike on Thursday that is expected to disrupt transport and commerce and which already has forced a late start to the European Union summit meeting in Seville on Friday.

Leaders of the 15 EU nations will start their summit two hours late on Friday because the host Spanish government decided that the strike on Thursday would complicate their arrival on the eve of the summit, which is the usual practice.

Instead, many of the leaders were expected to arrive early on Friday and rush to the opening session.

The summit marks the end of Spain's six-month rotating presidency of the EU, and Seville will be watched closely as a sign of success or failure for the 24-hour general strike.

Spain's two major trade unions called the strike, which starts at midnight local time on Thursday, to protest against the conservative government's unemployment reform. The unions say it will cut benefits to many of Spain's two million unemployed workers.

RESOURCES Strike action: When and where?

The strike could cause delays for 60,000 international travellers, especially from Britain and Germany, who normally arrive or depart daily from Spain's Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. (Flight chaos from air traffic controllers strike)

Unions there refuse to guarantee ground tourist transport at the main airports in Palma de Mallorca and Ibiza, because they consider the government-decreed minimum services to be excessive.

The fight is the same at the national level where the two main unions, the Socialist-oriented General Workers Union (UGT) and the Communist-oriented Workers Commissions (CCOO), appealed to the Supreme Court this week to overturn government-decreed minimum services in transport and other sectors.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said the strike "threatens Spanish society" and the nation's economic recovery. Unions retort that his government, which used its outright majority in Parliament to push through the unemployment reform on June 13, has forgotten about dialogue.

The one-day strike could cause revenue losses of at least $235 million, said the Institute of Economic Studies, a private Spanish organisation.

Spain's flagship airline, the private Iberia Airlines, announced that it expected to operate on the strike day only 184 flights, just 19 percent of its normally-scheduled 972 flights.

Commuter trains, metros and bus service will be key battlegrounds in the strike in Madrid and Barcelona. If they are disrupted early, many Spaniards simply may not be able to arrive at their jobs.

The strike also has caused postponement of a concert of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, at the Royal Opera House in Madrid. The strike delayed the rehearsal, scheduled for strike Thursday, which in turn forced a delay in the concert, that had been scheduled for Saturday.

Spain's unemployment rate of 11.5 percent is far above the EU average, but has been reduced by half since Prime Minister Aznar first won power in 1996, when the rate in Spain was 23 percent.

Since then, Aznar's government has introduced reforms that it said added flexibility to Spain's highly-regulated labour market.

The latest reforms would require the unemployed to accept government-designated "adequate" jobs up to 30 kilometres, or 18 miles, from their homes, even if the job is not in their normal profession.

Spanish business owners have long complained that regulations stifle growth and job creations because it is too expensive to hire or fire workers.

Unions say a spate of short-term contracts introduced in recent years in Spain amount to "garbage" contracts for workers, especially the young.

It is the first general strike against Aznar's government. There have been five others since Spain returned to democracy in the late 1970s. Probably the most successful strike was in 1988, when the country was virtually shut down and national television went dark.

The UGT union has 830,000 members and the CCOO union has 930,000 members. That is a relatively small percentage of Spain's overall workforce of 18 million, but the unions in the past have shown a capacity in general strikes to mobilise Spaniards who are not union members.