Spain’s footwear industry was bracing for its first nationwide strike in years as a bitter wage dispute collided with what manufacturers describe as an unprecedented structural crisis.
Unions UGT FICA and CCOO Industria called workers out for June 25, with two further strike days set for July 15 and 16, after rejecting what they call an inflexible “global and indivisible” package offered by employers in collective bargaining talks covering roughly 30,000 workers. The proposal includes wage rises of 3.5% plus a capped 1% review for 2026, scaling down to 1.75% plus 1.25% by 2028-2029, terms unions argue fail to protect pay against inflation running near 3.5%. A mandatory mediation session at Spain’s SIMA arbitration service took place on June 19 as a last attempt to avert the walkout, though as of this writing it remained unclear whether the session produced a breakthrough or left the strike call standing. Unions have also rejected a part-time, nine-month “fixed-discontinuous” contract model floated by employers, calling it a new route to job insecurity, and have refused employer demands to drop a pending lawsuit over unindexed 2026 pay tables.
The labor standoff lands at the worst possible moment for an industry already in steep decline. Fresh data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute released this week showed footwear sector revenue fell 5.9% in April, the steepest drop of any industrial category tracked, extending losses of 6.2% in January, 14.4% in February, and 2.3% in March. The sector’s cumulative revenue decline for 2026 now stands at 7.2%, on par with the struggling clothing manufacturing segment.
Also Read: Centro launches SS27 men’s formal footwear line
The revenue slide compounds a deeper structural unraveling that industry group AEC has called a crisis without precedent. Spain has lost more than a third of its footwear manufacturers since 2020, with the number of producers falling from 3,280 to 2,131, a 35% drop. Some 195 companies closed in 2025 alone. The Valencian Community lost 37% of its footwear businesses, Castilla-La Mancha 39.7%, Murcia 22.5%, and La Rioja saw comparable losses.
Production figures tell a similar story. Spain’s footwear production index fell 9.2% year-on-year in 2025 and plunged 29.1% in April 2026. Sector employment in leather and footwear dropped 10% in December 2025, with a further 1,704 jobs lost by May 2026, a 4.5% annual decline. The trade deficit reached 1.86 billion euros in 2025, with Spain importing 370.8 million pairs of shoes worth 5.25 billion euros against exports of 167.7 million pairs worth 3.39 billion euros. Asian suppliers, led by China, accounted for 83.5% of those imports. Read Here
Spain’s place in the global market underscores the imbalance. The country produced 71 million pairs of shoes in 2024, just 0.3% of the roughly 23.9 billion pairs made worldwide, ranking 19th globally, while China alone produced more than 13 billion pairs. AEC has also flagged that Spanish footwear imports rose around 18% in recent data, a trend it interprets not as healthy demand growth but as intensifying competitive pressure on domestic producers, even as imports fell in the United States and China over the same period.
The crisis follows a separate push by industry groups to secure government support. In May, FICE and AEC presented Industry Minister Jordi Hereu with a joint roadmap calling for a pilot modernization program to accelerate automation, robotics, AI adoption, and digitalization, alongside measures to address business succession problems plaguing family-owned manufacturers and stricter market surveillance against what they describe as dumping by Asian e-commerce platforms. The associations requested a technical working group with the ministry to translate the proposals into concrete measures. Five weeks later, AEC escalated its tone, warning that without urgent coordinated action, the deterioration could worsen through 2026 and 2027 with consequences difficult to reverse for employment and the country’s industrial competitiveness.
For now, the sector faces a dual reckoning: a labor conflict threatening to halt production this week, layered atop a multi-year structural decline that has already reshaped the map of Spanish shoe manufacturing.
