Around 200 workers blocked the entrance to a shipyard in Spain’s Basque Country on Friday to protest at what they said was the use of cheap, foreign labour to replace more expensive local contracts.

In a sign of rising industrial unrest as statistics showed unemployment had almost doubled in a year, the workers blocked the entrance to the yard from early morning, an official at Spain’s largest union, Comisiones Obreras, said.

The picketers say company La Naval is laying off some of their 1,100 subcontracted workers in order to hire cheaper, non-Spanish replacements, who were reported by Spanish media to include Romanians and Portuguese.

“This is not a complaint over whether the workers are foreign or not, but rather a call for equal wages across the board,” the union source said.

Nobody at La Naval was available for comment at the protest, which came as Spain’s Socialist government is trying to drastically reduce the number of foreign citizens coming to Spain to look for work.

via Spain workers block shipyard over foreign labour | Reuters .