The data is clear. Workers in the Basque Country, in the north of Spain, strike more than anywhere else in Europe.

From 1990 to 2017, there were 366 working days lost from industrial action per thousand employees in the Basque Country. Second highest in Europe was the rest of Spain, at 181, less than half the Basque figure. Only four other European states — Cyprus, Italy, Denmark, and France — have over a hundred workdays lost per thousand employees. Figures only from the previous decade, from 2010–17, show the Basque Country joint top with France for strike days lost.

Why do Basques strike more? Part of the answer came in a paper written by economists Jon Las Heras and Lluís Rodriguez Algans in December. Compiling the above figures in the article for the British Journal of Industrial Relations, they sought to explain the high strike rate in the land known as “Euskal Herria.” What they identify is the emergence of a union organizing strategy that goes against the grain of European trade unionism in the neoliberal era, by putting striking at the center of union activity, as opposed to an institutional focus on “social partnership” and delivering services to the rank and file. This is summed up in the slogan: “There is no union renewal without striking.”