Vaga!

The students are on strike. University faculty and staff are also in theory striking today, all over Catalunya, but at least where I work it seems to be mainly the students. Tuition at public universities is increasing by 7%, and some employees' salaries are being cut by 3%. Vaga! (Vaga means strike in Catalan.)

At first I was bummed that they are striking on a day that I don't teach, but apparently I would have been expected to teach anyway (or make up the class later, I guess, if I went on strike myself), and the striking students sometimes barge in on classes and are loud and disruptive and in the end it didn't sound like much fun at all. Although in the end, the students here aren't doing much, aside from maybe not being in class. Most of the action is happening at the University of Barcelona, which is more centrally located and a lot bigger than the university where I work. The students blocked a highway and made a huge traffic jam this morning and there was a rally at the Plaça Universitat this afternoon, and now some students are occupying the UB rector's office. (The rector of a university is like the president.)

On the one hand, university education is incredibly cheap here (less than a thousand euros a semester), and the country is broke. Cuts like this are inevitable, and 7%-higher-than-before tuition is still super cheap. On the other hand, no one likes having things taken away, and people are mostly broke and often unemployed to start with, so it's not surprising that they get mad about every cut.

Since I got here it's been a fairly regular pattern of cuts and strikes, and once the latest day or two of strikes and protests is over people go back to being mad but not on strike and talking off their roommates' ears at every opportunity about how bad the economy is and what shit the government is.

I wonder what comes next.