Introduction

As with political parties (chapter 10), the fate of trade unions in the past depended very much on the kind of political system prevailing at the time. For example, while they were allowed freedom to form and operate during the Second Republic (1931–36), during the Franco era all union organisations were proscribed by law and driven underground or into exile. The major unions affected in this way – indeed the major unions in existence since the nineteenth century – were the UGT (11.4.1) and the CNT (11.5.3); the latter, having been associated by Franco with the Anarchist movement, came in for particularly harsh persecution. In the place of these unions, the dictator established his so-called ‘vertical syndicates’ (sindicatos verticales), which in reality amounted to little less than submissive instruments of offical labour policy, strongly controlled by government. The 1960s, a period of rapid economic expansion (1.1.3), witnessed growing confidence and solidarity among workers and a tendency among certain employers to prefer to negotiate with the authentic representatives of labour in order to introduce new methods and to improve productivity. For a while, there was tacit toleration of unofficial bodies, such as the Workers' Commissions (11.4.2), until they were declared illegal in 1967. With the return of democracy after all unions were allowed to operate freely again and, reflecting the changed social and labour scene of the post-Franco era, a number of new unions were created at both national and regional level.