The Government agrees to negotiate with the Carriers and not resume the strike.

For the moment, the carriers won't carry out the stoppages announced. This Sunday's vote by the Associations for the Defense of the Transport Sector (which was the one who urged the mobilizations last month) resulted in 41% for the strike, 45% against and 14% abstentions. The carriers chose to negotiate with the Government, rather than paralyzing again the transport of goods, as they did three months ago.

They decide to wait to see what the Government proposes to do to the food chain law, which prohibits them working at loss. Sources from the platform confirm this. They explain that the carriers decided not to reactivate their strike and instead entered into negotiations for the law's development, with the Platform as a fundamental and representative sector.

They had negotiated with the Government before the vote. However, they were called by a spokesperson for the Ministry of Transport to summon them to an urgent meeting to deliver a draft of the Law prohibiting the hiring of losses in transportation. It has promised that the final text will be ready before July 31 after it has negotiated with representatives from the Platform. Legal processing of the document will begin. They warn that this does NOT mean that they are backing down. However, they caution that the strike remains suspended and that it is possible to reactivate "at any moment" if negotiations fail to be favorable or dates are not as agreed.

The food chain law is an already in place in the agricultural sector. Its objective is to regulate that the trucker's price for his services is always equal or higher than his costs. This is the great claim of Platform, which convened the March mobilizations.

Truckers' strikes began as isolated work stops and eventually paralyzed large swathes of the country. After several days of negotiations, the Ministry of Transport came to an agreement with the National Committee of Road Transport and the employers of the truckers. The pact also included a bonus of 20c per liter of petrol and aid for truck drivers.

It was the worst strike in sector history. According to the Board's calculations, nearly 1,000 million euros were lost in Andalusia. The stoppages at the Port of Bilbao caused more difficulties in transporting goods. Container companies requested that self-employed workers return to work after they had satisfied their demands. They offered 1,250 euro per truck as direct assistance to carriers to offset overruns in energy costs.

President of the Platform in those days, the most common phrase was "It costs less for truck drivers to get unemployed than to go to work."