Spanish Workers' Commissions

When Spain's post-war industrialization took off in the fifties, it drew millions of young workers from the countryside to the industrial areas of Basque Country, Catalonia and Madrid. In general they had no relationship to the traditional socialist and anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, which were brutally repressed during Franco's dictatorship. In order to defend workers' rights and improve the low salaries, badly taken care of by the official trade-unions, Comisiones Obreras (workers' commissions) were formed inside the big industrial plants, which took avail of the legal margins the regime allowed, such as the election of workers' delegates (jurados de empresa; as of 1953) and the negotiations for collective agreements (as of 1958).

Some of the participants in these commissions were delegates of the official trade unions (enlaces), among whom there were also members of catholic workers' organizations like the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Catolica (HOAC), which enjoyed a greater margin of liberty, or of the Communist Party that had decided to infiltrate the official unions. It took at least a decade for these commissions to become stable, successful organizations and establish some form of coordination at a regional and, in 1967, a state level. Although they tried to work within a legal framework, as of 1967 the strength and combativeness of the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) brought down a fierce repression upon them.

A central Comision Obrera was formed in Barcelona in November 1964, which coordinated the Comisiones in different industries in the town. In January 1965 it published its first leaflet, which is here reproduced.

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It relates in a nutshell the Comisiones' origin and presents the demands, which were characteristic of the movement at the time. It was found in the archive of the exiled Spanish anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán (folder 316) between his correspondences from the year 1965.

In 1977 the Comisiones Obreras were recognized as a separate trade-union confederation.

Source:
José Babiano, 'La memoria democrática : de las primeras Comisiones Obreras a la Asamblea de Barcelona', in: Comisiones Obreras : memoria democrática, proyecto solidario (Madrid, 2001), pp. 15-37.

Other archive material concerning the CCOO can be found in the archives:
- CCOO España
- Acción Comunista
- José Martínez Guerricabeitia
- European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC)
- G.W. Muller