Workers at the Acrylicos Vallejo paint factory in Barcelona, Spain have gone to the picket lines for a partial strike. The strike announcement was posted on Catalonian labor organization CGT’s Bluesky account.
The partial strike was 98% supported by the workers and will be indefinite. Workers will stop working each day and picket for two hours during their shift until their demands are met (production is still monitored). The workers’ demands, according to president of the company CGT committee Patricia Perez, include an improvement in safety and hygiene as well as Vallejo addressing the “major deficiencies” in building maintenance and obsolete machinery. Also, the workers claim that executives harass them and demand a protocol to deal with those incidents. Last but not least, the workers are demanding an increase in pay of 15%.
According to a statement released by CGT to YouTuber Hellstrom Wargaming, workers claimed to be making “almost the legal minimum wage.” The national minimum wage in Spain is $1,214 per month (converted from Euro), which is to be distributed over 14 payments to workers (just over $40 a day). A 15% increase would bring their wages to nearly $46 a day (providing Vallejo’s “almost the legal minimum wage” was somewhere close to $40 a day to begin with).
Acrylicos Vallejo is one of the largest miniatures paint companies in world and produces the popular Prismatic Paint and Game Color lines of paints (see “Acrylicos Vallejo’s ‘Game Color 2.0’“). A majority stake of this company was recently purchased by Proa Capital in 2023 for just under $53 million.
Source: ICv2
