The Good Book

I went to Toledo a day late.

I visited Toledo on Sunday instead of Saturday because Spain’s national railway company Renfe couldn’t get its act together to sell me a ticket.

Whole volumes could be written about the vagaries of of rail travel in Spain but I promise to keep my rant as short: my trip to Toledo was delayed a by 24 hours because none of the ticket machines at Madrid’s Atocha station were working, and because the staff in the ticket office seemed more interested in chatting with each other than flogging off tickets for the 10:20 to Toledo.

You can imagine the scene: crowds of confused tourists, irate Spanish grandmothers in fur coats, a slightly nervous, slightly overweight security guard. The minutes ticking away. I missed the train.

My first official complaint in Spain.

Anyway, it turned out the Saturday trip down to Atocha station wasn’t entirely fruitless. I didn’t make the train but I did have the pleasure of filling in my first bona fide complaint in all my years in Spain. That’s right: I actually resorted to the hoja de reclamaciones, or the official complaints book.

If you’ve spent any time in Spain, you’ve probably been vaguely aware of the existence of such things. These books — part of this country’s rickety consumer rights infrastructure —provide a way for people to vent their frustrations over anything from cheating taxi drivers to churlish taxidermists. In Andalusia, for example, the hojas are actually obligatory for all businesses, whether they be a religious artifacts shop or a first communion fashion store or a flamenco designer’s boutique.

After a while, you don’t really see these little signs, in that same way you don’t — in a bar — notice all the posters of waxy-looking Jesuses decked out in crowns of thorns or the mouldering stuffed bulls’ heads that line the walls. So it is with the hoja de reclamaciones.

But last Saturday at Atocha station I entered into the fray of civil society and demanded The Book. Driven along by indignado rage, I stormed into the Renfe customer service centre and noted down my litany of frustrations into a purple A4 jotter which felt like something you might use to decorate the set of a television show about a 1950s advertising firm. My complaint was then carbon-copied in quadruplicate — seriously – before each individual copy was decorated with a seal.

The Renfe staff on duty could not have been less interested. They handed me the book almost wordlessly and then silently presented me with two copies for my records. It set me wondering how many millions of these complaints forms have been filled out and filed away in dusty cabinets over the decades. Will anything ever come of my grievance? I wait with not-very-bated breath.

And Toledo? Well, given that – for reasons which remain mysterious — all Spanish towns have to be the capital of something, I can safely report back that Toledo appears to be the capital of Marzipan and swordmaking. Neither of these were items that I particularly felt like buying last Sunday, but it did occur to me a day or two later that some sort of sabre might have come in handy at the ticket office at Atocha station.

Talking rubbish

For the last few nights, Seville has been preternaturally quiet. Eerily so.

Generally I fall asleep here to the symphonic thud and thump of municipal street cleaners emptying the dozen or so garbage containers that line our street. Since last Sunday, though, the garbage collectors have been on strike. The result? A disconcerting – very un-Sevillian – silence between midnight and dawn. It’s almost too quiet to sleep.

At first, the strike didn’t bother anyone much, and one group was positively delighted: the city’s  garbage scavengers (and de facto recyclers). With the street cleaners out of the picture, they could rake through trash bags that were now conveniently piled up on the street instead of being buried deep inside a dumpster. It was a bonanza, but a short-lived one. Even the rubbish hunters are now struggling with the smell.

Today is day 9 of Seville’s rubbish strike; there are mountains of plastic bags on every corner, like postmodern sculptures only more interesting.

The rubbish story has been brewing since last year and involves a dispute between Seville’s town hall and workers at the city’s publicly-owned cleaning company Lipassam. The sticking points in negotiations between the two parties are holiday pay (reduced) and working hours (extended to 37.5 hours a week).

You might think the Sevillianos feel some solidarity with the poor fluorescent-jacketed workers of Lipassam; theirs is not a job I’d particularly want, and they are – after all – being asked to work more hours for less money. However, the handful of people I’ve talked to seem to think the city’s cleaners are little more than a pack of thieving whingers. The reason? They earn too much (and must therefore somehow be cheating the system, or so is the inference in this pathologically distrustful country).

Anyway, the town hall says the average annual wage for a member of the city’s garbage crews is €30,885 (around £25,000 or $US42,000) To put this in perspective, the average gross salary in Spain for 2010 – the last year for which figures are available – was €22.790,20 while El Publico pointed the most common salary that year was actually only around €15,500. So the Lipassam workers are doing quite well.

Apparently – and again this only according to my completely unscientific straw poll – these workers should therefore be happy with their lot. More than one person I spoke to suggested the Lipassam workers should be fired to a man/woman and replaced with some of those members of the 6 million-strong army of unemployed people in Spain who would happily work for far less than €30,885.

Sad days in Spain when non/workers turn upon non/workers.

Meanwhile, it has to be said that Lipassam’s own staff have not been terribly effective at making friends and influencing people. Several days ago, El Mundo newspaper published photos of cleaners demonstrating by littering the streets with scraps of paper they had no intention of picking up. Bad call guys.

And how do I feel? Oddly enough, I’ve been enjoying this garbage strike. It adds a touch of drama to the streets, and operates as a visual (and olfactory) counterpoint to the corruption scandal that has hit Spain’s ruling Popular Party in the last few days. In fact, I’m happy for the mountains of rubbish bags to grow so high that I have to wade through them – so high in fact that I can’t even see the horrible eyesore that is the new Cajasol Tower. That would be something.

Competition watchdog busts telcos

I can’t resist a touch of schadenfreude here: three of Spain’s largest telcos in Orange, Vodafone and Telefónica have just been slapped with whopping fines by Spain’s Competition Commission (the CNC).

The penalties totalling close to €120 million were imposed for anti-competitive strategies on SMS pricing from 2000 to 2009.

Detailing its decision to punish the unholy trinity, the CNC’s investigations Division said that the three operators had abused their dominant market position in those years by charging whatever they liked for SMS and MMS termination fees.

The competition watchdog said this had not only artificially lifted end-prices for consumers but had also priced virtual operators out of the market.

Telefónica will now have to shell out €46,490,000 while Vodafone is staring down the barrel at a fine of €43,525,000. Orange will be let off relatively lightly with a bill of €29,950,000.

I will be curious to see if the companies pay up on time.

And before I am accused of random corporate bashing, I do genuinely believe that mobile telephony pricing in the first world is nothing short of scandalous. The prices and service standards of Spanish telcos are also worse than those I have experienced anywhere else.

Madrid business school named Europe’s best

Madrid’s IE Business School has just been named Europe’s best by the Financial Times while two other Spanish institutes also help round out the UK business daily’s top ten.

In a crisis-bucking trend, Madrid’s prestigious IE moved up the FT’s business school rankings three places from last year’s number 4 spot. By doing so, the school also managed to knock France’s HEC Paris off a lofty perch it had held for six straight years.

There was even more good news for Spain with the University of Navarra’s IESE Business School claiming the FT’s number 6 spot and Barcelona’s ESADE coming in at number 7.

The Financial Times bases its ranking on schools’ performance across five programs – MBAs, executive MBAs, masters in management and open and custom executive education. To do this, the paper looks at the average salaries of graduates once they are three years out of the school but also awards extra points to school with a more international student mix.

Faculties get extra brownie points if they can boast of higher percentages of women and foreign teachers on staff while having a higher proportion of teachers with doctorates also pushes up a school’s rankings.

IE greeted the news of the Financial Times gong by saying the result consolidated their position as one of the best business schools in the world in terms of postgraduate education in business management.

Meanwhile, ESADE dean Alfons Sauquet told La Vanguardia newspaper that the result reflected the school’s dedication to excellence and its capacity to adapt in times of crisis.

Iberia staff to strike in Christmas lead-up

Staff at Spain’s national carrier Iberia will be striking in December to protest against airline plans to slash workforce numbers by around a quarter.

Unionised staff at the national carrier will walk off the job on the 14,17,18,19,20 and 21 of December to vent their anger at management plans to scrap 4,500 jobs and cut the salaries of remaining staff by as much as 35 per cent.

The unions say they have chosen the six days of their strike to minimise disruption to Christmas traffic and avoid busy weekend periods. Ground crew and cabin staff will be downing tool but pilots will clock on as usual during the rolling stoppages.

Iberia’s owner International Airlines Group announced a major revamp of the airline’s operations earlier this month in a bid to stop the profit rot. The company reported third quarter operating profits of €270 million this year, down from the €363 million notched up by the company in 2011.

The holding company – also owners of British Airways – said it now planned to stage a return to profits by cutting staff numbers and scaling down Iberia’s network capacity by 15 percent in 2013. They also plan to slim down their fleet by 25 planes and focus on the airline’s most profitable routes.

Responding today to news of the stop-work, Iberia chief executive Rafael Sánchez-Lozano told Europapress: ‘The strike at Iberia is like a hunger strike, if you win you die’. Clearly in combat mode, the airline boss also said he couldn’t see the advantage in a strike that would damage both the product and the brand.

Sánchez-Lozano added that Iberia would take a responsible attitude to talks with staff and was willing to listen to all options including ways to save on job losses ‘given that every person has a mortgage, or a school to pay’. He said, however, that the airline’s objective of return on equity of 12 per cent by 2015 was non-negotiable.

IAG have set a January 31 deadline for unions negotiations over planned changes at the carrier.