The workers who put Franco on the ropes

BarcelonaThis year, the Spanish government is celebrating 50 years of freedom in Spain. That is, half a century since the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. Despite the fierce repression, there were always people who stood up to him. In the last years of the dictatorship there was violence, fear and, especially in Catalonia, thousands of citizens who took to the streets to defend freedoms, the Statute and social justice. The ARA has already recalled this before. How the peasants stood up and, in this second chapter, he recovers one of the most powerful anti-Franco movements: the workers' movement.

In the seventies, Spain was the state with the greatest conflict in all of Europe. "Workers from Seat, Laforsa, ELSA, Solvay, Pegaso, Ford Motor Ibérica, Hispano Olivetti, La Maquinista, MACOSA, Gispasa, Roca, Radio Ibérica, Harry Walker, and many other industries, led the increase in struggles and the 7 that the wars put in place. finished off the regime in the streets," says historian and journalist Marc Andreu, director of the Cipriano García Foundation of CCOO. The strike data demonstrate this. In 1970 there were 1,547 strikes throughout Spain; in 1974 they increased to over 2,000; they reached 2,807 in 1975; and in 1976, which marked the significant beginning of the democratic transition, they rose to 3,662. That year, more than 2.5 million workers took to the streets on strike. "Workers in conflict and officially recorded hours of strike action in 1976, and only in Catalonia, were higher than the figures for the whole of Spain in any previous year," adds Andreu.

The failure of Franco's promises

Francoism was extremely useful to the business community. It promised a lot, and among the promises was the one to discipline the working class. But everything went up in smoke. “Without all these strikes, we would surely have had another Transition,” says Andreu. This explosion of the workers’ movement did not come out of nowhere. In 1951, the boycott of Barcelona’s trams evolved into a general strike throughout the metropolitan area and a new stage began. “In 1951, the Francoist authorities were forced to bring warships into the port of Barcelona and parade 4,000 soldiers of the marine infantry through the streets of the city as a show of force and to regain control of the situation,” Andreu details.

There was a reorganization of the workers’ movement, which infiltrated the Spanish Trade Union Organization created during Francoism, popularly known as the Vertical Union. When Franco created it in 1940, imitating the model of the unique workers' organisations of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it was not very useful for the labour movement because it was obligatory to have a Falange membership card to participate. Everything changed in 1954, when it stopped being obligatory and, even more so, after the law on collective union agreements of 1958. Then, a breach was opened that allowed the labour movement to infiltrate to demand and negotiate labour rights. "The Vertical Union was used to raise demands, but the success of CCOO overwhelmed the dictatorship, took it by surprise and intensified the repression," Andreu explains. Two of the most dramatic episodes of this repression were the arrest, in 1972, of the CCOO leadership – known as the 1,001 Trial – and the murder of the worker Manuel Fernández Márquez by the police at the Besòs thermal power station in 1973.

Pere Camps, founder of the Barnasants music festival, has a long resume as an activist and trade unionist. "I started working before I was 14, at the Hostafrancs Market, and at home we were reds and separatists. I have a strong class consciousness," he says. His first activism was in the metal sector of CCOO. In April 1975, the same year he had presented himself as a delegate, he was fired. "I went on a hunger strike, I resisted and politicised the dismissal. At that time, whether I won the trial or not, the company had the right to dismiss me," he explains. Camps was not reinstated, but he did manage to get compensation and unemployment benefits. "Then I realized that I could continue fighting. Every three days I had to go and sign the unemployment card and there were long queues of workers. I proposed to organize it and it became a brutal movement of unemployed workers," he recalls.

The assault on the Vertical Union

Camps explains that, at the end of the sixties, it was agreed that legal tools, such as the Vertical Union, should also be used to overthrow the dictatorship, together with illegal or clandestine ones. A turning point in this assault on the Vertical Union were the union elections of 1975. The unitary and democratic candidacies, which included Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), defeated the official electoral lists of the Vertical Union by a wide margin. Just a few examples: in Seat, out of 150 links, 119 won (79%), while in Olivetti and Riviere they all won, 100%. In Pirelli de Cornellà, 25 of the 28 links chosen went to the unitary and democratic candidacy, which also won against banks such as Bilbao and Santander.

Manuel Zaguirre Cano was elected general secretary and member of the clandestine confederal leadership in 1969. In October 1977 he was elected general secretary of the USO and was re-elected at subsequent congresses. "I was a member of the PSUC, but I didn't agree with some things. When I read the founding charter of the USO, I fell in love with it. You could see that it had been written by very young people. It wasn't technical language, it was a generation that hadn't experienced the war, who wanted rights and freedom," he says. Zaguirre recalls the cover of the magazine Doubloon, after that union victory: "The facade of the Vertical Union appeared, full of dwarves, who carried a backpack with the initials CCOO and USO on it, and painted the facade red. The headline was: "The colored team has won." A victory like that raised morale a lot, it was a great relief, it was a great relief.

When Sabadell became Petrograd

In 1976, the demonstrations overwhelmed the repressive movement of the State. Not everything was happening in Barcelona. In Baix Llobregat there were important strikes, such as the one at Laforsa, which lasted 106 days, between November 1975 and February 1976, or the one at Sanitarios Roca, where there were 96 days of struggle and very tough confrontations with the police. In Vallès, the workers' movement was also very strong: over five days, from 23 to 27 February 1976, Sabadell experienced one of the most intense chapters in its working-class history. Franco had been dead for four months. Workers, children, teachers, shopkeepers, bankers... took to the streets. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Minister of the Interior, said: "Sabadell has been occupied like Petrograd in 1917."

That year, the Franco regime opened more than 59,000 repression files for a city of only 47,000 inhabitants. The Sabadell strike began when mothers, teachers and children went out demanding free education and schools for all. On February 13, the police charged against the mothers and children. In the middle of the street a banner was hung up saying "The police have beaten the children." They were not the only ones who took to the streets. Those days, the workers of Asea-Ces also demonstrated. They were demanding more security after Patricio Matencio was electrocuted. The people had had enough. They did not want a recycled Francoism, but to reclaim the streets.

"The local popular movement came to light, fed up with arbitrary actions, repression and thirsty for freedom. A workers' movement, eager to come out of hiding, that said enough and was impossible to stop. And a neighborhood movement that knew how to organize, of civility throughout the country," explained the late journalist Xavier Vinader in the book When the workers were the owners. A week of political general strike in Sabadell in February 1976.

"We were a new generation that was not so afraid because we did not have the memory of the war, although there was also torture and death. We wanted to overthrow the dictatorship and avoid a government that continued," says Pere Camps. The founder of Barnasants argues that they conditioned the government of Adolfo Suárez (Spanish president between 1976 and 1981). "There was a very powerful alliance between the workers' movement, the neighbours and culture and, in Catalonia, we had an instrument that did not exist in the rest of the State, which was the Assemblea de Catalunya. Solidarity was key and continues to be key," he adds.