Spain's Workers Walk Out

Pickets clashed with police, many shops were closed and hundreds of flights were canceled Thursday as workers staged Spain's first general strike in eight years.

Police arrested 31 strikers, in some cases as they sought to keep people from reporting to work. Two people were arrested for trying to stick nails and silicone in door locks to shut workers out.

The unions are protesting cuts in unemployment benefits. Their one-day nationwide protest aims to embarrass conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as he prepares to host a two-day European Union summit starting Friday in Seville. It poses the stiffest challenge to Aznar from unions since he took power in 1996.

The Workers Commissions, a labor federation, said that in at least three areas of Madrid police rushed demonstrators after skirmishes and heated verbal exchanges.

Dolores Moreno, a spokeswoman for Spain's other main labor group, the General Workers Federation, said she saw police in riot gear attack members leaving the group's Madrid regional office to head toward a picket line at a bus station. One striker was bleeding from the head, she said.

The Interior Ministry said the police intervened because the union members were trying to block a major thoroughfare.

The Spanish government and the unions gave wildly differing versions of the strike's effects.

Finance Minister Rodrigo Rato described participation as minimal and said the stoppage was the opposition Socialist party's biggest defeat in 20 years.

"There has been nothing even approaching a generalized strike," he told reporters.

But the labor federations said around midday that 84 percent of workers had taken part in the stoppage.

Parts of downtown Madrid looked anything but business-as-usual.

In the normally bustling shopping streets around the Puerta del Sol, many stores were shuttered. Many stores also closed in Barcelona, Spain's second largest city.

Outside the Corte Ingles department store, riot police with black helmets and truncheons stood guard to fend off a crowd of whistle-blowing strikers.

The protesters, most of whom apparently work elsewhere, screamed obscenities at anyone who entered or left the store. Frightened shoppers scurried away.

Saturnino Benito, a 41-year-old butcher, took issue with Aznar's plans to halt welfare payments to unemployed people who snub job offers three times.

"It is like calling Spanish workers lazy and scum," he said. "It's just not right."

The government's unemployment reform, passed by decree last week, would also eliminate salary payments to Spanish workers who have been fired and are appealing in court. It would also curtail payments to temporary farm workers. The Spanish jobless rate is about 13 percent.

Clashes and other incidents were reported around the country, but there were no major cases of violence.

Buses provided minimal service, as mandated by the government, and the Madrid metro system ran with about half its normal number of trains.

Two-thirds of the 1,000-plus arrivals and departures at Madrid's Barajas airport were canceled. Nationwide, the flagship carrier Iberia ran just 20 percent of its scheduled flights. Iberia says the strike is being respected in part by pilots, flight attendants and ground crew. The protest is unrelated to Wednesday's strike by air traffic controllers in many European countries.

State-run Spanish TV scrapped its regular morning talk shows and ran 1960s movies or cartoons.

Spain's last general strike was in 1994, when Felipe Gonzalez, a Socialist, was prime minister. It was called to protest his overall economic policy, blamed among other things for soaring unemployment.