But where are all the captured guns? The trade unions in the Spanish state following the transición

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I wrote on this list about a week ago, on the 20th of this month
(next Thursday) there is to be a one-day general strike, called by the
main Spanish state trade unions.  The strike is in opposition to a
recent government reform of the unemployment insurance system, which
threatens the benefit of unemployed people who do not accept the offer
of what is termed a 'suitable job'. [1] This strike will be the first
directed against the present government of the Partido Popular (PP)
(there were two previous one-day general strikes - in 1988 and 1994 -
directed against Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) governments), and it
comes during the Spanish Presidency of the EU and on the eve of the
European Council summit of heads of state in Sevilla on 21-22 June.

If this all sounds hunky-dory up to now, then the picture it paints is a
misleading one, for it belies the desperately difficult situation that
the trade union movement in the Spanish state finds itself in.  The rest
of this post is an attempt to give a background picture of the state of
affairs of the trade unions here in the Spanish state.


*************


THE 'INSTITUTIONALISATION' OF THE TRADE UNIONS

Since the end of the dictatorship in the 1970s the trade union movement
in the Spanish state has been dominated by two organisations: UGT (Unión
General de los Trabajadores) and CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), which
together have come to represent nearly 80 per cent of the organised
workforce.  UGT was formed in 1888 by the same group of
social-democratic militants that founded the principal party of Spanish
social democracy, PSOE.  Its membership grew to one million during the
Second Republic.  During the years of the Franco dictatorship, UGT was
reduced to operating as a group of exiled leaders; and although during
the 1960s it slowly began to rebuild its organisation in the Spanish
interior, its leaders were not able begin to return to Spain until 1972.

CCOO, on the other hand, grew out of the ad hoc 'comités de base' -
illegal but unofficially tolerated by the Franco regime - which were
being built during the 1960s to facilitate collective bargaining within
the tightly-controlled francoist union structures.  The Spanish
Communist Party (PCE) - uniquely - held a position of infiltrating these
state-controlled unions ('entrismo'), and it was their intervention into
these structures that laid the base for the emergence of CCOO.  Although
outlawed in 1968, CCOO maintained an organisational structure and built
itself under conditions of illegality almost as a kind of semi political
party (it only formally declared itself to be a trade union in 1976). 
At the opening of the period of 'transición' following Franco's death,
it was CCOO that pressed forward the campaign for a unitary trade union
movement, while it was UGT who argued the merits of plurality in trade
union organisation the better to reflect the existing differences in
political consciousness within the broader working class.   In part,
this difference was a result of the fact that at that point CCOO was
considerably the more influential organisation.  Although joint
activities between the two organisations have subsequently increased,
especially since the end of the 1980s, there still remains a rivalry
between them, making the possibility of a unified organisation appear
far off (this rivalry is only increased by the phenomenon of 'union
elections' - see below - on the results of which state subsidies are
determined).

But exactly how big are the trade unions today?  We can only go on
figures declared by the unions themselves (figures which are often
treated with suspicion), but on this basis we get the following picture:

------------------------------

TABLE 1: Declared membership of main Spanish trade unions, 1997 (smaller
unions excluded)[2]

Union  Membership   % of total union membership

CC.OO    790 000                35.2
UGT      775 000                34.4

TOTAL  2 249 400               100.0

------------------------------

These figures indicate that the level of affiliation of the Spanish
state unions is very low, among the lowest in western Europe, in fact
(remember that we are talking of an economically active population of
around 15 million). [3]  Despite this, however, the unions' social
influence is in fact wider than would be expected.  Unions in Spain
enjoy a legal position on the face of (but, as we shall see, only on the
face of it) it the envy of other countries.  This is because of the fact
that the main way that Spanish unions function in defence of the
workforce is through what is called the 'comité de empresa' (workers'
committee), the organ of workforce representation in workplaces of 50 or
more employees.  In contrast to traditional trade union representatives,
the comité de empresa is elected by the entire workforce, be they union
members or no.

The election of the comité de empresa is by what are called 'elecciones
sindicales' (union elections), even though the term is something of a
misnomer since both the workers and their representatives need not be
union members (although the latter almost invariably end up being so). 
Nevertheless, candidates for election are normally put forward by trade
unions through listas sindicales (union slates), and their results are
commonly used as a measure of relative trade union influence (upon which
money rides).

Thus there is a striking discrepancy between the role that unions play -
a role won from, or granted by, the post dictatorship (bourgeois)
democracy - and their real strength in terms of paid-up members.  In
part, this discrepancy finds its roots in the political strategy adopted
by the whole workers' movement - the political parties as much as the
unions - in the transición, a strategy that can be summarised as the
prioritisation of winning a stable bourgeois democracy over all other
goals.  Along these lines, both the union organisations (but especially
UGT) entered into a series of political and social agreements with the
various governments of the day from the late 1970s to the mid point of
the 1980s.  These agreements covered a wide range of workplace issues:
wage rates, working hours and conditions, work discipline, absenteeism,
overtime; effectively, for playing the role of a workplace policeman and
regulator, the unions were granted a seat at the big peoples' table. 
And it is this that lies at the heart of the unions' dilemmas.  They
rely for their current influence on a structural position granted to
them.  The Spanish unions are not mass unions because they don't need to
be: their political role (and in part their funding) comes from what has
been conceded to them by the successive governments of the transición. 
It is difficult, therefore, to see how the unions can take effective
action in defence of workers' interests without breaking form their
institutionalisation, for this would amount to biting the very hand that
feeds them.  The situation of the trade unions in the Spanish state is
reminiscent of the concept of 'negative integration', coined by Dieter
Groh to describe the way in which the German SPD was incorporated into
the institutional governmental framework of the German Empire prior to
World war One.



THE 'FLEXIBILISATION' OF THE SPANISH WORKING CLASS

What is normally here called 'precarious' employment - i.e. temporary
work contracts - is, probably even more than unemployment and
underemployment - the key structural feature, and the biggest problem,
of the Spanish state labour market.  Spain has the highest level of
temporary employment in Europe by a long, long way (some 20 points),
standing at present at around a third of all employment.  Temporary
working was introduced into working life through the Spanish Socialist
Party's 1984 Reforma del Estatuto de  los Trabajadores, which ostensibly
aimed at facilitating the creation of new employment by liberalising
what was considered an especially rigid labour market (inherited from
the dictatorship) and have become a structural feature of Spanish
employment.  (I say 'structural', since it bears little relation to
typical patterns of seasonal work or gender distribution of employment,
towards which the reforms of 1984 and 1994 were ostensibly aimed.)

------------------------------

TABLE 2: Wage-earning population with temporary contracts by sex and
sector (public or private), 2000 [4]

                
                  Number       %

TOTAL            3 693 300    31.6

Public sector      481 500    20.3
Private sector   3 211 800    34.6

WOMEN            1 533 400    33.7

Public sector      274 600    23.8
Private sector   1 258 800    37.1

MEN              2 159 800    30.3

Public sector      206 900    16.9
Private sector   1 953 000    33.2

------------------------------

It is significant to note that this increase in labour flexibility was
introduced in Spain specifically by reducing the level of job security
of new entrants into employment, not by attacking the job security of
existing permanent workers.  Thus the patterns of labour flexibility
over the 1980s and 1990s have especially sharpened the division between
core and peripheral sectors.  And it is among this former layer that the
trade unions have maintained their base of support and affiliation. 
This exceptionally sharp division between core - permanent - and
periphery - temporary - within the Spanish workforce, and the
disproportionate base of support for the unions within the former give
the present union organisations the appearance of a veritable
aristocracy of labour within Spanish conditions.

As a consequence of this overall flexibilisation of the Spanish labour
market, during the second half of the 1980's the rate of new job
creation was extremely high: from 1986 to 1990 almost two million new
jobs were created.  (In the ten years following the death of Franco the
rate of unemployment had quadrupled: from five per cent in 1977 to 21
per cent in 1985).  Unemployment at the end of the 1980s fell by almost
6 per cent, from 22 per cent in the fourth quarter of 1985 to 16.1% in
the fourth quarter of 1990.  This drop occurred despite the fact that
over 1,100,000 people entered the labour market during this period
(896,000 of them women).  But a clearer picture of the type of
employment engendered by the 1984 reform emerges when it is born in mind
that the level of temporary contracts among the newly employed - i.e.
those in their current jobs for less than a year - stood at 61 per cent
in 1987 and rose to a remarkable 81.5 per cent in 1990.  In 1999 the
total number of new contracts signed which included some kind of time
limit, which were in other words temporary in some respect or other, was
9 659 737; compared to a total number of 1 010 836 time-indefinite new
contracts. [5]

Yet this expansion in employment was a fragile beast: based as it was on
such an enormous level of low-paid, short-term jobs it was particularly
sensitive to changes in the economic climate.  1990-94 saw another
enormous rise in unemployment, which, although capped during the latter
half of the 1990s, is now, in 2002, starting to rise again. [6]

------------------------------

TABLE 3: Unemployment, 1987-2001 [7]

Year    Number of unemployed

1987        2 936 500
1988        2 899 000
1989        2 555 100
1990        2 438 200
1991        2 388 200
1992        2 686 000
1993        3 396 700
1994        3 762 900
1995        3 537 500
1996        3 535 800
1997        3 364 900
1998        3 070 000
1999        2 550 700
2000        2 345 500
2001        2 192 100

------------------------------

However, alongside the twin problems of high unemployment and the
highest rate of labour flexibility in the European Union, Spain is
additionally a low wage economy.  The last government increase in the
national minimum wage, the Salario Mínimo Interprofesional (SMI), put
its level to EUR 442.20 per month (or EUR 14.74 per day).  This level,
less than EUR 2 per hour, is the lowest in the EU and is far below the
EU average of EUR 5.65. [8] It is true that most workers are covered by
compulsory employer-union agreements (another of the institutional
advantages enjoyed by the unions) which normally set wage levels
relatively higher: the SMI stands at 35% of the average national wage,
which means that the former is very low and that many people earn more.
But it is still estimated that half a million Spanish workers receive
the minimum wage. [9] That both UGT and CCOO demanded a seven per cent
rise for this year speaks volumes of their timidity.  Nevertheless, even
this paltry demand was dismissed out of hand by the government.


THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR

At present between 30 and 35 per cent of total union members come from
the public sector, although it is difficult to obtain accurate figures
because within the unions it is common to organise public and private
sector workers jointly.  Nevertheless, given the fact that the public
sector workforce is disproportionately better-organised by the trade
unions than the private sector, a word of explanation on the nature of
public sector employment within the Spanish state is appropriate at this
point.  The creation of the 'state of the autonomies' in the late 1970s
and early 1980s resulted in a very complicated and top-heavy three-tier
system of government.  As a consequence of this, the number of public
sector workers significantly increased.  Employment in the various
public administrations rose from 1,438,700 employees in 1985 to
2,037,400 in 1999, at which point the public sector employed slightly
over 20 per cent of the economically active workforce. The greater part
(around 75 per cent in 1999) of the public service sector workforce are
what are called 'funcionarios públicos', effectively, civil servants. 
These workers are appointed with tenure and regulated by administrative
law; non-civil service staff are hired according to the normal labour
legislation for the private sector.  The funcionarios, although included
in this would be top level civil servants - magistrates, judges, and so
on - also include a great many low level administrative and clerical
workers.  The great advantage of being a funcionario - which is why
practically everyone wants to be one - is that one enjoys qualitatively
greater job security and conditions of work (except pay, which is low,
if not the lowest).  'A job for life', as the begrudgers would have it,
it is not; but it is close.  For this reason many ordinary graduates
will dedicate two, three, four or more years (without public financial
assistance) of full-time study after their university studies (for basic
undergraduate degrees normally five years anyway) studying for the very
demanding oposiciones (the competitive public entrance exams which are
the compulsory gateway for entering the career of a funcionario) in
order to get a boring, routine, not terribly well-paid office job in a
local or national government department.  But the growth of public
sector employment and the maintenance of the enormous discrepancy
between public and private sector working conditions reinforce the
division between core and periphery within the working class and is a
conservatising influence on the unions and their leaderships.


CONCLUSION

In August 1914, as the German armies rolled across Belgium and France
practically unopposed, presaging a stunning military victory in only a
matter of days, far away in the German High Command in Berlin the Chief
of General Staff, Helmuth Moltke, was worried: he sought evidence for
the spectacular collapse of the opposing armies, and of this there was
little.  'But where are all the prisoners?' he would ask his junior
officers.  'Where are all the captured guns?'

The Spanish transición is a little like this.  And it weighs on the
brain of the Spanish state left like a nightmare.  The revolutionary
left, who prophesied a revolution, have been left apologetic and
disorientated.  PSOE, who bedded in Spanish bourgeois democracy through
sixteen years of government in the 1980s and 90s, and, this task
completed, found itself discarded, is in crisis.  (It is naturally
difficult for PSOE - and thus to some extent UGT - to develop a critique
of the functioning of today's Spain without at the same time drawing up
a negative balance sheet of its own period of government, and this is
something it is neither willing nor capable of doing: for its formative
role for modern Spanish bourgeois democracy remains for PSOE a source of
pride, not of shame.)  Much the same could be said of the Communist
Party, who gambled everything - spectacularly unsuccessfully - on being
admitted as a 'reliable partner' of the main bourgeois parties. 
Meanwhile, the Partido Popular, the linear descendent of Franco, finds
itself in government, this term with a comfortable overall majority in
the Cortes, and if the opinion polls are anything to go by, are heading
for another comfortable parliamentary cushion in the next one.

Along the same lines, the Spanish state trade union federations have
been in good measure architects of their won misfortune.  The degree to
which the unions participated in the process of stable transición from
dictatorship to democracy should not be understated.  Between 1978 and
1986 the unions lent their support to a wide range of government
measures relating to wage levels, employment conditions and workplace
discipline.  Most important of these were the 1978 Moncloa Pacts, union
adherence to which being the main reason behind the fact that Spain was
one of the few OECD countries to experience a steady decline in real
wages and unit labour costs over the course of the 1980s.  And UGT
consented to the measures contained in the 1984 employment reform which
introduced temporary working.  Alongside winning a legitimising role at
the level of government decision-making, it is interesting to note that
the unions did not go unrewarded for their services in monetary terms
either: through the 1982 Acuerdo Nacional sobre el Empleo the government
subsidised the unions to the tune of 800 million pesetas distributed
over 1982, 1983 and 1984.  On top of this, UGT received a further
billion pesetas in 1984.

Thus it is clear that for both trade unions - as much CCOO as UGT -
however left their conference demands are, their focus for challenging
the problems facing Spanish workers is through pacts with both
government and employers, rather than militancy.  At both unions' last
conferences - UGT's in March of this year, CCOO's in April 2000 - the
approach of the leaderships received endorsement.  It is encouraging to
note, however, that what calls itself the 'sector crítico' has emerged
inside CCOO, winning around 30 per cent of the delegates at both CCOO's
last conference and the one before.  Yet the sector crítico functions
very much as an internal opposition within CCOO, focusing its demands on
inner union democracy, rather than developing a public face as an
opposition, and has a long way to go before it develops into a genuine
way out of the crisis. [10]

Thus for all the chest-beating that we see at union conferences, for all
the speechifying we will hear in the run-up to 20 June, the Spanish
trade union movement looks an increasingly toothless beast.  The
timidity of the unions' response to the conditions facing Spanish
workers can be witnessed, for example, in the December 2001 national
agreement, signed by both UGT and CCOO on the one side and the two major
Spanish employers organisations on the other.  The pact stated that wage
moderation and internal flexibility in companies, along with training,
professional qualification, investment in technology and better quality
products and services, were favourable factors for 'competitiveness, the
capacity for growth and job creation'.  In relation to pay, the
signatories agreed that wage bargaining in 2002 would take as a
reference the government's inflation forecast of two per cent: wage
increases higher than this forecast inflation rate would be permitted
only on the basis of productivity increases.

With friends like these, who needs enemies.




NOTES
 
 
[1] The key point of the reform is that the unemployed will have their
entitlement to unemployment benefit cut or removed completely if they
refuse the offer of a 'suitable job' (empleo adecuado) by the public
employment services.  Furthermore, the reform moves towards abolishing
the current system of workers continuing to receive their wages while
awaiting the resolution of an unfair dismissal claim.  The government's
approach (supported by the major employers' organisations) was summed up
in its declaration that 'society cannot show solidarity towards persons
who do not want a job.'

[2] (All statistics, unless otherwise indicated, are from the on-line
European Industrial Relations Observatory, which can be found at
<http://www.eiro.eurofound.ie/>).  The most important of the smaller
organisations that have been excluded from this list are the
anarchosyndicalist CNT and CGT (both effectively insignificant as trade
unions, even if the latter has something of a track record of
organisation in the telemarketing sector); and the principal Basque and
Galician unions (allied to nationalist parties) - Eusko Langileen
Alkartasuna/Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos, (ELA/STV) and the
Converxencia Intersindical Galega/Convergencia Intersindical Gallega
(CIG) who are, although not significant on a Spanish state level, very
important in their respective minority national areas.  But this latter
aspect lies outside the scope of what I can cover here.
 
[3] The Canadian Association for the Right to Work gives the following
comparative figures for union membership as a percentage of wage and
salary earners in Europe:
 
Austria      41.2%  
Denmark      80.1%  
Finland      79.3%  
France        9.1%  
Germany      28.9%  
Greece       24.3%  
Hungary      60.0%  
Iceland      83.3%  
Italy        44.1%  
Netherlands  25.6%  
Poland       33.8%  
Portugal     25.6%  
Spain        18.6%  
Sweden       91.1%  
Switzerland  22.5%  
Britain      32.9% 

The low figure for France arises from the fact that French trade unions
enjoy a favourable structural position in relation to rights of
collective bargaining if anything greater than that that obtains in
Spain (Figures from <http://www.adat.ca/Page_9_StatisticUnion.htm>)

[4] Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Encuesta de Población
Activa, fourth quarter 2000.

[5] Anuario El País 2000.

[6] In fact, the current rise is far higher than it actually looks, for
two reasons.  First, as of January 2002, the quarterly Encuesta de
Población Activa has changed its definition of unemployment to comply
with criteria laid down by the European Union's Eurostat: under the
latter's definition, unemployed people are only those persons who are
registered as such at the unemployment office (in Spain, the Instituto
Nacional de Empleo, INEM) and who have contacted the office in order to
seek work actively in the four weeks previous to the survey.  People who
are registered and wait for the employment office to contact them are
now no longer counted.  It is estimated that around half a million
people (two or three percentage points) will now be excluded from the
unemployment figures as a direct consequence of this change.  The second
reason to see the current unemployment rate as a deflated figure arises
from the curious fact that the number of contributors to the social
security system continues to grow at a higher rate than employment,
which, under present conditions, can only be explained by a large-scale
legalisation of immigrant workers, i.e. by a legalisation of existing
jobs rather than the creation of new ones.

[7] Source: Encuesta de Población Activa.

[8] At the time of writing the Euro stood at US$ 0.95.

[9] Spain thus even falls outside the guidelines set by the Council of
Europe's committee of independent experts for the implementation of the
European Social Charter, who stipulate that a minimum equitable wage
stand at 68 per cent of the average national wage.

[10] A report of the recent CCOO congress appeared in the May 2002
edition of International Viewpoint (which can be found online at
<http://www.3bh.org.uk/IV/>).

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