The government has declared a civil requisition of Lisbon port, following a further week in which stevedores maintained a total blockade on ships loading or unloading.
The move was decided by an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers on the basis that if minimum services were not assured, vital supplies for Lisbon, the Azores and Madeira would be compromised.
According to the executive, SEAL – the stevedores syndicate – as well as the workers themselves, were not ensuring ‘minimum services’ required during a strike.
Said a statement to the press, due to the added pressures of the Covid-19 outbreak, the government decided to step in before there could be any risk of supermarket or pharmaceutical stocks ‘running out’.
A civil requisition is a mechanism written into the Constitution that “assures the regular function of certain fundamental activities, the momentary or continuous paralysis of which would cause serious upsets to social, economic and even political life in any part of the territory, in a sector of national life or fraction of the population”.
For now there appears to have been no reaction from SEAL which called this particular strike after seven companies agreed to dock stevedores wages across the board (click here).
