An Overview of Trade Union History in Spain

Contributed by Enrique Antuña

The ninteenth-century dawn of spanish trade unionism (1868-1931)

The history of trade unionism in Spain anchors its roots in the middle decades of the 19^th century. By then, the classic subsistence uprisings common in Europe, usually spontaneus and ephemeral, started to be substituted by more organized, politically shaped and driven movements.

The early 1870's were particullarly important. In The Hague and Saint Imier, within the International Workingmen's Association, Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin protagonized the cracking of the still young multinational unionist effort. The outcome was auspicious to marxists, but the echoes of the rhetorical clash reached the Iberian factories and fields mightily, and with quite a different result. Almost all the members of the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA stood behind Bakunin, thus laying the foundation of a strong presence and growth of the anarchist ideas among the spanish working class fot the last decades of the century and the first if the next one.

The blooming of the labour movement as a political concern had had started just a few years ago, thanks to the climate propitiated by the 1868 Revolution which put the Bourbon monarchy into a six-year parenthesis, the so called “Demotratic Sexennium”. Precisely in the aforementioned year, Giuseppe Fanelli, an italian follower of Bakunin, arrived at Barcelona and settled the basis for the upcoming expansion of the libertarian ideas in hispanic soil. Cooperativism and collective strike as vindictive strategies began to rise among the working people, as they did names as Anselmo Lorenzo or Pablo Alsina, the latter a republican weaver considered the first working-class representative in the spanish parliament.

The end of the Sexennium led to a rough military repression and a subsequent reorganization of anarchist positions in secrecy, with new groups and ideological trends trying to maintain the organizative structure of the Federation. Strikes and repression followed one another, and violence took its place in a country where harsh labour conditions were widespread, specially in the large plantations of the south. Authorities promptly sought to take advantage of the situation, and gave publicity to pretended secret anarchist and socialist terrorist groups, such as Mano Negra (Black Hand), whose actual activities and even existence is hard to determine.

Not everything was a withdrawal, though. Those intersecular years were ones of ideological and conceptual deepening. In France, the first republican, then socialist and finally anarchist Fernande Pelloutier renewed and gave impulse to the concept of job boards, as a key tool for an still hypothetical self-sufficient, State-independent workers society. Other resources joined the unionist practice, like solidarity boxes for pregnant and widow women or sick workers, creating a revolutionary gear effective for sustained social struggle and, specially, to deprive it of any political party dependence.

With all that baggage, owned or imported, the spanish anarchists reorganized themselves in new, strong and stable entities, like Workers Solidarity (Solidaridad Obrera), created in 1907 and seed of the future National Work Confederation (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, CNT). The CNT was formed in Barcelona, in 1910, and represented an already polish form of anarchist understanding and practice of the labour mobilization which will last and evolve until this day.

At the same time, organizative growth and unity and stability were hardly compatible. The anarchist labour movement in Spain experienced a significant fragmentation towards the end of the XIXth century, and the successive attemps of creating (and especially maintaining) new, stable forms of movilization failed to consolidate until the new age.

As for the marxists, despite of their not so pleasing starting point back in the 1870´s, they would not renounce to their part in the early history of Spain´s trade unionism. If scarce, their militants were skilled, restless and veteran in action, as well as backed by their own prestigious figures, like Marx´ daughter, Laura, and her husband and prominent socialist himself Paul Lafargue. The couple took refugee in Spain after the demise of the Paris Commune in 1871, making contact with spanish socialist representatives in the IWA. One of them was Pablo Iglesias Posse, a letterpress worker and founder, in 1879, of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE). Almost a decade later, in 1888, the socialist main labour movilization structure, the General Workers Union (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT) was created. Both entities will conform the great alternative to the anarchist labour approaches until the political turmoil of the Civil War.

Relying mostly on those two great streams, spanish labour movement fought many battles during these final decades of the 19th and first ones of the XXth centuries, risking and losing much, but also obtaining some resonant victories. Among them, arguably the most important one was the strike of the Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, better known as “La Canadiense”, in 1919. Protagonized by the CNT, and spread to other sectors after more tan 40 days of workers´ struggle, the strike earned the 8-hour workday as well as a recognition of the Confederación and the labour movement in general as a force with significant gathering and disruptive power among spanish public opinion.

In the 1920´s, the exhaustion of the political system, based since the late 19th century in the “turnismo”, or alternation between the main parties, liberal and conservative, led to the instauration of a military dictatorship with Miguel Primo de Rivera as its head. Not without hesitations and internal division, the socialists put into practice a strategy of colaboration with the regime, in order of capitalizing the opportunity for obtaining further labour improvements, which allowed them to reach several high positions in key institutions like the Superior Work Council (Consejo Superior del Trabajo). During the last years of the decade, though, the dictatorship faced its own decline, and UGT turned its back at it in a new series of strikes and demonstrations.

The turning point of the Second Republic and the Civil War (1931-1939)

The proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 opened a new, yet brief, era for spanish trade unionism. The constitution enacted the same year defined the country as a “Democratic Republic of all class of workers”. Such a premise injected high expectation in the working population, and was supported by a firts two years of leftist republicans and socialists government. However, the regime coincidence with the shock wave of the international Depression, the lack of a steady regime and the victory of a right-wing coalition in 1933 spoiled the progressive political and social measures taken in the firts years.

The classic left-wing trade unionism protagonized by socialists, anarchists and, to a lesser extent because their low implantation across the country, communists, collided with tentatives from the right to attract students and workers to different positions. The fusion of minor groups around Falange Española give Spain its own version of the “national syndicalism” with echoes of France and fascist Italy. The class of the two great wings of the political spectrum in their labour forms deepend radicalism and intensified the violence in the streets, where fire arms took hundreds of lifes in the few years before the starting of the Civil War.

In the summer of 1936, a failed attempt of coup d´état instigated by sectors of the military and supported by part of the population and the Catholic Church split the country in two. The left-wing trade unions, yet usually critic with it in the previous years, stood with the republican government. The authorities distrust the Army after the uprising, and since part of it had joined the enemy, used the labour organizations for giving weapons to the workers in defense of the Republic among the chaos of the budding war. As a result, some regions of Spain became brief laboratories for the “social revolution”, specially those where the anarcho-syndicalism of the CNT was dominant and republican institutions particularly weak. The colectivization of factories and crop fields, now ruled by their workers, was one expression of these phenomenon.

The social experiment did not last for long, though. In the spring of 1939 the Republic and its allies were finally defeated, and general Francisco Franco started a personal, conservative dictatorship which would last for almost 40 years.

The withdrawal under Franco´s regime (1939-1975)

The outcome of the Civil War entailed the wrecking of the trade unionism growth in Spain. The minority Falange was taken by the regime as a tool for the establishment of a one party political system, and the national syndicalism idea transformed into the so called “Sindicato Vertical” (vertical union), the embodiment of a corporatist. Fascist-inspirated organic fussion between workers and managers. Previous forms of trade unionism were banned.

The forces and operative structures of the left faced a quick dismantling and harsh repression, the remaining agents and representatives scattered in european and american exile. Only in the course of the years would came a discreet new flourishment of labour consciousness in the gaps of the system. With UGT and CNT virtually suppressed, the lesser levels of the Catholic Church served as a place of reunion for the youth and the working class, under the umbrella of social consciousness opened by many priests, specially in the outskirts of industrial cities. There, a new generation could read and discuss about political theory and their role and place in the country. That ambiance cristalized in organizations like the Young Christian Workers, originally founded in Belgium in the 20´s.

In the central years of the century, the activity linked to the religious organizations and the appearance of renewed, if initially discrete and always thoroughly punished, demonstrations and strikes announced the survival of vindictive spirit among spanish population specially students and workers. In the spring of 1962, a series of strikes started by asturian miners and followed in the Basque Country and Catalonia showed that repression would not be enough for demovilize labour conflictivity from now on. On the contrary, it scalated during the next decade, until Franco´s death in 1975, and continued for the years of the complex transition to democracy.

The reconstruction of trade unionism during the democratic transition and its current challenges

The passing out of the general put into motion an inevitable change in the country, altough not inmediatly. In 1977 five labor lawyers associated with the Communist Party and Comisiones Obreras, the structured union founded from those committees of workers of the past decades, were assassinated by a far-left terrorist commando in Atocha, Madrid city center. The same year, the first free general elections since the Second Republic took place in Spain.

In those critical moments of turmoil and hope after several decades of political blackout, with the legalization of old and new parties, a new democratic Constitution coming on in 1978 and a general sentiment of change, the embryo of spanish contemporary trade union system was stablished. Socialists of the PSOE and UGT settled along with communist Comisiones Obreras as the main entities for workers´ representation. Today, 50 years after the restauration of democracy, those two remain as the big workers representation institutions, facing the present issues of labor market, and the challenge of keeping the classic structure and mechanics of trade unionism adapted to modern working population needs and expectations.

SOURCES AND WORKS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Alía Miranda, Francisco: La dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930): paradojas y contradicciones del nuevo régimen. La Catarata, 2023.
• Calle Velasco, María Dolores de la; Redero San Román, Manuel (eds.): Movimientos sociales en la España del siglo XX. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2008.
• Castillo, Santiago: Historia de la UGT. Vol. 1: un sindicalismo consciente, 1873-1914. Siglo XXI, 2008.
• Casanova, Julián: De la calle al frente: el anarcosindicalismo en España (1931-1939).
• Gil Pecharromán, Julio: Los años republicanos (1931-1936): reforma y reacción en España. Penguin Random House, 2023.
• Gómez Roda, J. Alberto: Comisiones Obreras y represión franquista. València 1958-1972 Universitat de València, 2004.
• Heywood, Paul: Marxism and the failure of organised Socialism in Spain, 1879-1936. Cambridge University Press 1990.
• Ortiz Heras, Manuel; Ruiz González, David; Sánchez Sánchez, Isidro (coords.): Movimientos sociales y Estado en la España contemporánea. Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001.
• Gabriel Sirvent, Pere: «Anarquismo y anarcosindicalismo en la España del siglo XIX», pp. 127-
• Perfecto, Miguel Ángel: Las Derechas Radicales españolas en la época contemporánea (1800-1975). Su influencia en América Latina. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2021.
• Redero San Román: Estudios de historia de la UGT, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1992.
• Vadillo Muñoz, Julián: Historia de la CNT: utopía, pragmatismo y revolución. Catarata, 2019.
• Vadillo Muñoz, Julián: Historia del movimiento libertario español: del franquismo a la democracia. Catarata, 2023.