Labor movement in Spain

The labor movement in Spain began in Catalonia in the 1830s and 1840s, although it was during the Democratic Sexenio when it was really born with the founding of the Spanish Regional Federation of the First International (FRE-AIT) at the Workers' Congress of Barcelona in 1870.

In the final stage of Franco's regime, a new organization called Workers' Commissions (in Spanish: Comisiones Obreras) emerged, which together with the reconstituted UGT, will be the two majority unions from the beginning of the new democratic period until the present day.

[3] In a letter dated October 17, 1854, Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels: "The careful study of the Spanish revolutions makes clear the fact that they needed about forty years to demolish the material basis of the domination of the priests and the aristocracy, but in that time they succeeded in making a complete revolution in the old social regime".

[4]Also in Catalonia, the first general strike took place in 1855, during the progressive biennium —a period of extension of the movement to other areas of Spain— and also in Catalonia the first Workers' Congress met in 1865, followed by another in 1868, the latter held after the triumph of the Glorious Revolution of 1868, which by recognizing for the first time freedom of association put an end, at least momentarily, to the persecutions and prohibitions that incipient workerism had suffered during the previous forty years.

"In Spain, the International was founded first as a simple appendix of Bakunin's secret society, the Alliance, which was to serve as a kind of recruiting base and, at the same time, as a lever to manipulate the entire proletarian movement.

[...] In June 1870 the first Congress of the Spanish International was held in Barcelona, where the plan of organization was adopted which was then fully deployed at the Valencia Conference (September 1871), which is in force today and which has already given the best results.

Meanwhile, the minority Marxist group tried to fill this vacuum with the creation of the workers' party PSOE in 1879 and the working class union UGT in 1888.

In 1907 the trade union confederation Solidaridad Obrera was founded in Barcelona, of anarcho-syndicalist tendency, and which published an organ of expression of the same name, a newspaper popularly known as the "Soli".

They agreed to create the CNT (National Confederation of Labor), which would become the main mass union of the Spanish working class until the civil war, surpassing the UGT.

Composed of unions "without ideology" in principle, they have little organizational discipline, trying to avoid the promotion of the strike as an economic weapon to stop the "direct action".

And yet, the magazines and libraries that their groupings promoted contributed decisively to the culturization of the working class in those years when public education was conspicuous by its absence.

Evidently, the assembly and federalist character of the organization allowed each federation of the confederation, at the sectoral or local level, to make the decisions it saw fit.

The impact on the PSOE and the UGT is quite well known, leading to the creation of the first Spanish Communist Party; but not so much is insisted on the fact that it produced great sympathy among the confederal milieus, with the CNT becoming affiliated to the III International for a time.

The government banned the "Soli" (Solidaridad Obrera, official organ of the confederation), closed workers' centers and arrested leaders.

At the end of 1919, the government tried to make a pact with the unionist sector of the CNT, but the Federation of Employers raised the "lock-out" and the struggle intensified.

There was a spectacular anarcho-syndicalist response, ending with the assassination in Madrid of Prime Minister Eduardo Dato in early 1921 by three anarchist gunmen.

During the first two years of the Second Republic, the workers' movement enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, since the authorities were favorable to it, although the economic circumstances were not.

[12] This situation culminated when, after the electoral triumph of the CEDA in November 1933, the social advances obtained in the previous two years began to be cut back, which gave rise to the revolutionary movement of October 1934 and its harsh repression by the government, especially in Asturias and Catalonia.

In the heat of the social changes and of these mobilizations, together with the generational change that took place at that time, new groups of worker activists arose, linked to Christian base movements, Hermandades Obreras de Acción Católica, HOAC, founded in 1946; the Young Christian Workers, (Juventud Obrera Cristiana, JOC).

will be originated, driven by the Maoists of the PTE and ORT, Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (among its leaders Francisco Casero, Diego Cañamero and Sánchez Gordillo), Sindicato Obreiro da Construcción de Vigo y La Coruña in Galicia (José Luis Muruzabal Arlegui, member of the PTE, will play a central role in the origin of them).

CC.OO, wanted to capitalize on habits of clandestinity, and UGT, was interested in defending the usual practices and structures of a trade unionism in legality, common to the rest of Europe.

In reality, the communists discovered during the clandestinity that for them a platform, a movement, was infinitely more operative than a union: for this reason they liquidated the one they had, the OSO (Oposición Sindical Obrera, an organization promoted by the PCE (ml) and member of the FRAP never participated in the CC.OO.

These ideological struggles not only affected the organizations involved but, as a result, a large part of the USO's militancy joined the UGT in 1977 and the Comisones Obreras in 1980, weakening it considerably.

This confrontation provoked a split within the union, creating what is now known as CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), a name that had to be adopted by judicial sentence, since this second sector claimed to be the continuation of the CNT.

Also significant was the police set-up of the Scala Case, blaming the CNT for what happened, provoking a wave of repression and persecution that frightened a large part of the anarcho-syndicalist militancy.

The CNT remains faithful to the principles of struggle with direct action that made it the most important Spanish trade union in the 30s and carrying out the social revolution, now despite its limited social presence, maintains not only its principles and impeccable purposes but preserves its anarcho-syndical structure ready for moments of crisis in which the working class can see the CNT as an alternative.

Backed by the PCE, they achieved a rapid diffusion and were characterized by fighting, from within, against the vertical unionism of the Central Nacional de Sindicatos.

After the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, it regained legality and from 1986 onwards strengthened its leadership within the Spanish trade union movement.

in 1988 to protest, in the opinion of these unions, against the social-liberal policies of the PSOE, calling a general strike throughout Spain on December 14, 1988, with a massively supportive response from the population.