On Monday, 19 October, El Mundo: Correos’s headquarters on Conde de Peñalver, Madrid, is heading for an indefinite strike, in the middle of the process for the 29 November general election. Heading for, not already on unlimited strike today. The reason, according to Sindicato Libre: the end of remote work, imposed by chairman Pedro Saura.

Partial stoppages began on Monday from 13:00, through Friday. The union has also called three strike days, 27, 28 and 29 October, then indefinite from 3 November. The calendar overlaps postal voting. El Mundo: the Electoral Census Office starts sending papers on 9 November; the campaign, on the 13th; postal-vote deposit runs to the 25th. We have not written that the election will not be held.

El Debate, 7 October: the same track, the same dates from Libre. The headquarters is where staff keep the paperwork on postal votes. Applications, then, could be made until 19 November. The union spoke of about 1,100 employees called back from remote work, into a building that, they say, cannot hold them. That is not a company headcount.

Monday morning, a union account in El Mundo: the Correos site ran for a while on parcels only, without postal-vote requests. The incident was not taken until 8:00; partial recovery around 10:00. The union links the outage to the dispute, but rules out sabotage. Their fear is Iris, the processing system. Quote: “it could blow up”. Their version, not a finding of the electoral board.

The trigger, still according to the union: a visit by Saura, empty offices, though people were working from home. At the end of June the company cut remote work. Libre: after six years it is still unregulated; some staff had moved out of Madrid. A few have sued the company individually. Lawsuits, not verdicts. The protest, the organisers say, is “purely labour”; the calendar was voted in assembly before the election was called.

CSIF, another union, on 9 October suspended its own protests until after the vote. This is not all of Correos on strike. After the 2023 general election the company already had to defend postal-vote custody in public. That is not a verdict on 2026.

Image: Palacio de Comunicaciones, Plaza de Cibeles, Madrid, 9 August 2012, Selbymay, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The historic palace, now city hall, not the Conde de Peñalver headquarters.

Sources consulted: Peligra el voto por correo y el de los incluidos en la ley de nietos: los empleados que se ocupan de ello pueden ir a la huelga — El Debate; La sede central de Correos se encamina a una huelga indefinida en pleno proceso electoral por el fin del teletrabajo impuesto por Saura — El Mundo.