ORANGE TIDE

The “Marea Naranja” (“Orange Tide” in Spanish) is the citizen’s movement that defends the public and qualified system of social services in Spain. So on, this is a way to reject the losing of social rights and the reconversion of the social system into a charity one. The initiative meets, for first time in history, citizens, families and professionals. Together, they show their reject to the cuts of social services in national budget wearing an orange t-shirt.

CGTS (General Council of Social Workers, from its Spanish initials) is an active member of the movement. Recently, has been chosen as the representative of the rejection of European social workers against social cutbacks. The CGTS has distributed about eight thousands of them, around all Spain. As a result, the “Marea Naranja” is gaining more and more strength.

The global initiative was gestated last spring. A few professional associations of social workers from different autonomic communities had formed platforms within other professionals, associations and users of the public system of social services. As other social movements had used a color to show their protest against the cuts –green in education, white in heath, or black in the civil service- the movement of the social services has chosen orange according to the tradition. For example, the families affected for the non-payment of the Dependence Law use to wear an orange t-shirt in every demonstration. That color also had been used by social workers in order to protest or represent our profession.

Consequently, the Spanish Council expanded the idea of wearing an orange t-shirt to the rest of professional associations of the State. To make it possible, the CGTS decided to print t-shirts, to distribute them to all the colleges of social workers and also sell them to other professionals and to individual citizen. Officially, the “Marea Naranja” was born as a national movement the 15^th of September 2012. That day, hundreds of thousands of people participated in a demonstration in Madrid against the cuts, promoted by the “Cumbre Social” (“Spanish Social Summit”), which is formed by the labor unions and hundreds of associations, between who is the CGTS.