In Portugal, a general strike against budget cuts and tax hikes has stopped trains and buses, grounded planes, and halted services from healthcare to banking. Labor unions organized the day of action, Portugal’s first general strike since 1988, to protest a raft of austerity measures including plans to cut wages for civil servants by five percent and freeze pensions. Graciete Cruz is a Portuguese trade unionist.

Graciete Cruz: “The workers, the men and women workers, and other layers of society certainly will fight against it, because we cannot accept that kind of policy, which is the policy that has been followed ever since, always. It has always been the workers paying for a crisis from which they are not responsible for.”