A Coruña declares sanitary emergency as garbage strike escalates amid corruption probe

The streets of A Coruña have become a staging ground for a conflict that has little to do with garbage collection and everything to do with power. On Monday morning, Mayor Inés Rey signed a decree declaring a public health emergency, authorizing the city to hire an outside contractor to clear the mountains of waste that have accumulated on sidewalks and in plazas over the past month. The garbage workers employed by PreZero, the company contracted to handle the city's refuse, have maintained a rolling series of partial strikes since late June, and as of Sunday they have called an indefinite work stoppage. The streets reek. At night, fires break out in trash containers—roughly a hundred have burned so far, causing an estimated 280,000 euros in damage to buildings, parked cars, and storefronts.

What makes this crisis unusual is not the garbage itself but what lies beneath it. The leader of the Sindicato dos Traballadores da Limpieza, the union that represents most of the sanitation workers and has orchestrated the protest, is Miguel Ángel Sánchez Fuentes. He is currently under investigation in two separate corruption cases—one in A Coruña, another in the neighboring province of Ourense. Prosecutors allege that for years he extracted payments from workers he placed in temporary positions at the company, enriching himself with the tacit approval of PreZero management. Now the company wants to strip him of that hiring authority entirely. The strike, according to sources close to the negotiations, is fundamentally about that loss of control.

Rey, a Socialist, has grown impatient with what she calls a pattern of extortion masquerading as labor activism. The union has staged twenty-one similar conflicts over fifteen years, she notes, and each time previous administrations—whether Socialist, conservative, or left-wing—have capitulated. Disciplinary cases against Sánchez Fuentes and his associates were routinely dropped. Illegal work stoppages that violated minimum service requirements were tolerated. The city simply gave in. "They've been extorting this city for eighteen years," Rey said in a statement. "I think that's enough." This time, she has vowed, there will be no concessions.

The practical mechanics of the emergency declaration are straightforward but slow. Companies interested in the cleanup contract have until 10 a.m. Wednesday to submit bids. They must demonstrate they can field thirteen vehicles and thirty-two workers immediately. The actual removal of debris cannot begin before Wednesday at the earliest. Rey has had to commission environmental, safety, and legal assessments before signing the order—a more cautious approach than she took in 2022, the last time she declared a sanitary emergency over a garbage strike. Then, she had the legal certainty of knowing no indefinite strike had been called. Now she does not.

The union's spokesman, Alfonso Seijo, confirmed that the indefinite strike remains in effect. The committee insists it has nothing to do with the nighttime fires that have plagued the city—incidents that, by their account, damage the union's cause more than help it. Yet Rey noted with visible skepticism that four union members were identified by police near containers that were burning. They claimed they were there to help extinguish the flames. "It's remarkable," the mayor said, "how close they happened to be to the fires, and how far away they were when it came time to collect the garbage."

Opposition parties have lined up behind Rey's emergency declaration, viewing the strike as blackmail divorced from genuine labor concerns. The union counters that it is fighting for workers' rights and denies any connection to the corruption investigation. "We'll see if there's actually guilt," union members responded when asked about the link between their demands and Sánchez Fuentes's legal troubles. What happens next depends partly on how quickly a contractor can be found and partly on whether the indefinite strike holds. The city is bracing for more nights of fires, more accumulating waste, and a test of whether a mayor can finally break a cycle of capitulation that has defined A Coruña's labor politics for nearly two decades.