Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- 5 The Vertical Syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy
- 6 The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez
- 7 Wage contracts, labour conflicts and political protests: the syndical practices of the labour movement
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Vertical Syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- 5 The Vertical Syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy
- 6 The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez
- 7 Wage contracts, labour conflicts and political protests: the syndical practices of the labour movement
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Labour unions! Don't be stupid. Since when have they ever solved anything? We're all friends here, so let's not fool ourselves. We know only too well how we appoint the rabble's representatives. They're under our thumbs! Nobody listens to them, not even the stones. And the two or three that slip by us are out there in the streets with the others.
Alvarez de Toledo, The StrikeIn his attempt to assess the contribution of the so-called Vertical Syndicate to the progress of Spanish society, Selgas (1974) asserted that for thirty years it had provided both employers and employees ‘adequate instruments for the promotion and defense of their professional interests in a climate of collaboration and social harmony’. The roll of honour in the achievement of such harmony included José Antonio Girón de Velasco, for initiating social security provisions; Fermín Sanz Orrio, for the Law of Collective Contracts; Jesús Romeo Gorría, for extending the social security net; José Solis Ruíz, for promoting greater participation and so ‘modernizing’ the syndicate; and all those who had worked anonymously in the ‘social sections’ of the different syndicates, and in the workers' councils. In this view, the evolution of the Vertical Syndicate sat squarely within a corporate tradition, which was ‘reestablished in almost pristine form in the Spain of Primo de Rivera and Franco’, who ‘attempted to deal with the phenomenon of mass-man by erecting corporate structures that provided for class harmony rather than conflict, structured participation rather than rootlessness and alienation’ (Wiarda:1973).
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- Making Democracy in SpainGrass-Roots Struggle in the South, 1955–1975, pp. 79 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989