The streets of Madrid are covered in uncollected rubbish and its been this way for ten days.

On the one side you have the rubbish-collection workers who have been faced by having their salaries slashed by 43 percent – something they consider unacceptable; hence the strike, and on the other the private refuse-collection company that employs them.

Now the Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella (ex-Prime Minister, Aznar’s wife) says that it is purely a problem between the company and its workers, but that argument is wearing thin as the international press picks up on the insalubrious and completely unacceptable state of the nation’s capital city.

Quite apart from the unwelcome international attention, as far as the City Council, governed by the conservatives, is concerned, the citizens of Madrid are far from impressed. As far as they are concerned they pay their taxes, rigorously, to the City Hall, to have clean streets, but instead they have to wade through scattered and stinking rubbish.

Undoubtedly, the posture of Mayor Ana Botella is unsustainable because the citizenry of the city pay their taxes to the municipal administration and it matters not if the administration subcontract to a private company for the cleaning of the streets – the administration accepts the bucks so the buck stops there.

After all, if you pay a builder to paint your house and hand over the money, but he subcontracts to a smaller company who fall down on the job, he is responsible to you; not the subcontracted company.

For this reason the ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude of the Botella administration has changed, realising that her inaction will be costing her votes, not to mention the negative publicity in the foreign press. She threatened the two sides that if the situation is not solved in 48 hours, she will hire a different company to clean up the mess and pass the bill to the original company.

But it is not as easy as that, despite the crisis, because the workers of the company that would be drafted in to carry out the task have announced that they will not be used as scab labour and thus stab their colleagues in the back.

(News: Madrid, Spain)