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RESIDENCY PERMITS

Why are staff at Spanish embassies around the world on strike?

Staff at Spanish embassies and consulates in at least seven different countries have joined a strike that started in the UK, leading to delays in visa processing for many around the world.

Published: 27 May 2022 10:22 CEST
Spanish embassy London
Staff at the Spanish Embassy in London in 2017. Photo: Tolga AKMEN / AFP

If there ever was a clear indication that Spanish salaries and work conditions are not in line with that of their European counterparts, this may be it. 

It all began on March 14th 2022, when workers at the Spanish Embassy in London called an indefinite strike. 

They demand and continue to demand a salary update after thirteen years of reported wage freezes, equal pay for all workers in the same administrative category, and the option of contributing to Spain’s social security system rather than the UK’s. 

The manifesto by Spain’s consular staff explaining the reasons for the strike, under the headline “Abandoned”.

The salaries of Spain’s consular staff in the UK range between €20,000 and €26,000 per year, not enough to cover London’s sky-high living costs, employees rightfully claim.

READ ALSO: Spanish Embassy staff in UK go on strike over pay and work conditions

These demands and strike actions were replicated at consulates in Manchester and Edinburgh later on in March, and although the huelgas (strikes) in the United Kingdom have been reduced to a couple of hours a day after strike organisers PLEX (Labour Personnel of the Foreign Service) reached some consensus with Madrid, the problems aren’t completely resolved yet.

In fact, anger against Spain’s Foreign Affairs Ministry (Ministerio de Exteriores) appears to be boiling over around the world.

Domino effect 

Protests in the UK have now incited strikes among Spanish embassy staff in other countries including France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland and Australia.

Staff based in China are also showing their support by sending letters to their superiors with similar demands.

In Israel, Spanish consular workers are protesting outside their embassy during their lunch breaks, and throughout Latin America embassy staff are getting ready to carry out their own strikes.  

As is the case with staff in the UK, they are challenging their low pay and wage freezes, which they claim often don’t meet the minimum wage in the country they’re living in.

According to union representatives, all staff abroad have had their salaries “frozen since 2009, despite inflation and greater pressure on the workforce, which is creating an increasingly tense environment”.

In France at the consulate in Lyon, worker Marta Navarro has said that they “earn below the French minimum interprofessional salary and that the only way the consulate is managing to function is due to internship staff” who can be paid less.  

While in Germany, Spanish embassy staff are protesting the loss of purchasing power after 13 years of salary freezing, for which they demand a salary increase. The salary of a consular official at the Berlin consulate is around €36,732 per year. 

In Brussels, employees say that although in 2019 there was a 3.2 percent increase in wages in most European Union countries, it did not make up for the loss of purchasing power. They argue that in the last nine months there have been four wage increases in Belgium and they have not received any of them. 

And down under in Australia, Marcos Redondo, an official of the Spanish Consulate in Sydney has told the Spanish press that “in 2017 they were on strike for 35 working days.” But after almost a month and a half, the workers could not sustain the strike, as they could not afford the loss of wages. Since then, they have sent several letters addressed to the Australian ambassador to Spain saying that Sydney workers “are again below the legal minimum wage for the fifth consecutive year”. 

Although the main demand of Exteriores‘ workforce abroad is a wage increase, they also want a labour agreement, which will regulate their working conditions. Those in the UK also want to be able to contribute to Spain’s social security system rather than the UK’s, which since Brexit offers higher benefits than the British system.

Visa processing delays and longer waiting times

Spain’s embassies and consulates abroad are responsible for issuing Spanish passports, offering assistance to Spanish nationals and processing visas for foreigners who want to move to Spain, among other responsibilities. 

There have been reports that hundreds of Spaniards residing in the UK are trapped in the country as a result of their passports expiring and not  being able to get an appointment to renew their documents at the Spanish embassy or consulates for months, even before the strikes began in March.

This showcases how deep rooted the problems are at Spain’s embassies and consulates in the UK. In 2021, Spain went for six months without having an Ambassador in the United Kingdom and there have been ongoing complaints for the past years about long queues, poor service and lengthy processing times, all of which have worsened as a result of Covid-19 and Brexit.

Spanish embassy and consular workers by contrast argue that they are not only underpaid, they are understaffed.

From a foreigner’s perspective, the recent strikes in the UK have meant that anyone trying to apply for Spain’s Non-Lucrative Visa, Golden Visa, work visas or student visas has had to wait longer than they had originally planned for appointments and processing, causing some documentation to expire and affecting their relocation goals. 

This backlog of applications is now slowly but surely addressed in the United Kingdom, but new strikes and protests by consular staff around the world are likely to result in a similar limbo for many other applicants who have to deal with Spanish embassies or consulates.

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For members

RENTING

Do I have to pay the estate agent a commission if I rent in Spain?

Who has to pay the real estate agent commission (usually equivalent to one month's rent) in Spain: the landlord or the new tenant? And are there exceptions to the rules or underhand tricks agents use to get tenants to cough up more money?

Published: 24 April 2024 10:16 CEST
Do I have to pay the estate agent a commission if I rent in Spain?

Up until 2023, the general rule in Spain was that both the landlord and the tenant would both have to pay estate agency fees when a rental contract was processed through them, although in some cases it was just the arrendatario (tenant) rather than the arrendador (landlord) who had to foot most of this commission.

Tenants often had the sense they weren’t getting much in return out of it, as it was common to find apartments hadn’t been cleaned, filled with broken furniture and other appliances that weren’t working.

On top of a commission to the agency equal to one month of rent, tenants had to pay one to two month’s deposit and a month’s rent, meaning they had to pay a total of three to four months’ worth of fees upfront, which would rack up to a lot of money. 

READ ALSO: The cities in Spain where people fight most over a place to rent 

Thankfully, Spain’s housing law, brought into force in May 2023, put an end to this and now it’s solely down to the landlord to pay the agency fee as they’re the ones who hired them.

The law, which modified part of the Urban Leasing Law of 1994, now states: “The expenses of real estate management and formalisation of the contract will be borne by the lessor,” that is, the owner of the property.

READ ALSO – Renting in Spain: Can my partner move in with me?

One of the main problems is that agencies have been doing this for so long that they stand to lose quite a bit of money and may continue to ask tenants to pay on the side. 

Alejandro Fuentes-Lojo, a lawyer specialised in real estate law explained to Spanish news site Newtral: “Many professionals will try to circumvent this prohibition, and in some cases they will try to make the tenant pay out of pocket, but we must warn that if they agree, they will be unprotected by the law”.

Be aware, even though tenants shouldn’t have to pay the full agency fees anymore, there are certain circumstances in which they may still have to pay something.

The Rental Negotiating Agency (ANA), states that there are a series of exceptional cases where real estate agencies can pass some of these expenses on to tenants, specifically when they are offered a series of additional services that directly benefit them.

These expenses could include house cleaning services at the end of the lease, repair services and legal advice during the duration of the contract, or other services where it can be proven that they have a direct benefit for the tenants. These expenses can only be collected after the contracts are signed.

READ ALSO – Q&A: When can you legally leave a rental property in Spain? 

The general director of ANA and a lawyer specialised in leasing, José Ramón Zurdo, states: “The new Housing Law does not regulate or limit the impact of expenses that accrue after the signing of the contracts, because the limit of expenses that can be passed on is closed after this time”.

According to the new housing law, expenses that can’t be passed on to the tenant include management expenses charged by real estate agencies for intermediating, searching for tenants and showing the homes. Tenants can also not be charged for expenses of formalising contracts or paying any lawyers or notaries involved.

There are also four exceptional cases where agencies can still charge fees to tenants, when they are not habitual residence leases and, therefore, are not regulated by the Urban Leases Law.

These include:

  • Tourist accommodation
  • Rental of commercial or office space
  • Seasonal rentals
  • Luxury housing leases – Properties whose surface area exceeds 300 m2 built, or whose rent exceeds the interprofessional minimum wage by 5.5 times.

READ ALSO: Spanish court rules buyer can purchase property directly from seller without paying agency fees

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