The Struggle of the Cadiz Metalworkers Shows the Way to Fight Attempts at Further Exploitation

Since Tuesday, November 16, metalworkers in the Bay of Cadiz, in the south of Spain on the Atlantic coast, have been on a major strike, one of the toughest in recent Spanish working class history.

A bourgeois commentator, in the editorial of a local newspaper in the city, compared it to the strike in the shipyards that took place 45 years ago, lamenting – according to the silly ideology of his social class – how the city would be stuck in the 19th century.

The bourgeoisie is lulled into the illusion of an eternal social peace and cannot admit that the class struggle arises from the social relationship between Capital and wage labor, does not belong only to the past of capitalism but to its present and will determine its future fate. It is enough to observe the wave of strikes that has crossed the United States in recent months to deny the thesis that the most advanced national capitalisms have definitively overcome the class struggle.

The strike originates from the loss of purchasing power of workers’ wages in the last ten years, aggravated by the rise in inflation in recent weeks, and in this context from the negotiations for the renewal of the provincial collective agreement, expired December 31, 2020, between the employers’ association of small and medium companies – the Femca – with the regime unions – the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the Union General del Trabajo (UGT) – broken by the employers at the end of October.

Of the approximately 27,000 metalworkers in the province, 70% work on temporary contracts. These receive a salary on average 1,500 euros less annually than workers with fixed, permanent contracts.

The former work mainly in small and medium-sized companies that work as contractors for large companies in the area, such as the three Navantia shipyards in Cadiz, Puerto Real and San Fernando, Airbus, Dragados, whose direct employees are instead mostly hired on permanent contracts, with relatively better employment conditions, defined in company contracts. Negotiations for the renewal of the provincial contract therefore involve only the employers’ association of small and medium enterprises – the Femca – and not the large companies involved.

A first demonstration was called by CCOO and UGT on October 21 in front of the Femca headquarters.

A few days later a minority union present among the metalworkers in Cadiz, the Coordination of Metalworkers (Coordinadora de Trabajadores del Metal – CTM) – formed in March 2020 – denounced the exploitative conditions in the Navantia shipyards in Cadiz and Puerto Real, which in recent months have resumed work at full capacity acquiring orders for the repair of large cruise ships, employing about 1400 workers, most of them employees of small and medium-sized companies, many of them working up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The labor employment system appears similar to that of shipyards in Italy, where most of the workers are not direct employees of Fincantieri which, like Navantia, is a State-owned company. This should dispel any doubts about the presumed goodness of the claim of nationalization, in Italy contested by the majority of combative unionism.

CTM also denounced the employers’ black list, i.e., the list of workers undesirable because of their union militancy, with dozens of expulsions from their jobs, forced to emigrate, with the hiring supported by the CCOO and UGT, and claimed to oppose this a Labor Exchange, i.e., a list of workers to be hired according to non-discriminatory criteria managed by the unions.

At the end of October, the employer Femca broke off negotiations for the renewal of the provincial contract. CTM – which claims to be fighting for class unionism – called for a general assembly of metalworkers by the unions CCOO and UGT, in order to let the workers know the progress of the negotiations and not conduct it behind their backs. Also according to the CTM, the CCOO and UGT organize less than 20% of temporary metalworkers.

CCOO and UGT, in response to the breakup of Femca, have called a two days-long strike on October 9 and 10, which CTM, without obviously revoking its criticism of these regime unions, has correctly indicated to adhere to, as a sign of the unity of action of the workers in the union struggle.

Another minority union active among metalworkers in the province of Cádiz is the General Confederation of Labor (Confederacion Generale del Trabajo – CGT), a historically anarcho-syndicalist’s organization present because of its presence, for example, in the Airbus plant and in a contractor company of Dragados.

The two-day strike was a success, with thousands of workers crossing Cadiz in a compact and fierce procession. The strike also affected Algeciras – another town in the province of Cadiz, on the Strait of Gibraltar – stopping companies in the port and the Acerinox steel mills, which employ about two thousand workers. This showed the degree of the workers’ anger and their willingness to fight.

It was this pressure from below that led CCOO and UGT to call an indefinite strike, as mentioned above, starting on November 16, the course of which confirmed its inevitability, which the regime’s unions went along with in order to avoid losing control of the workers.

The claims made by CCOO and UGT were for a wage increase of 2% for 2021, 2.5% for 2022 and 3% for 2023, against the bosses’ proposal of 1.5% for each of the three years and only with an increase in productivity.

From the first day of the strike and for the next ten days, the workers had to face the action of the police who attacked the workers on the picket lines in front of the factories and even in the workers’ quarters, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and using an armored car to break through the barricades set up by the workers.

This is the response of the Spanish center-left government, formed by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), Podemos, the Socialist Party of Catalonia and the United Left, and which has called itself « the most progressive government in the history » of Spain.

Evidently it is the response of a bourgeois government in defense of the interests of the bosses threatened by an actual strike and terrified by the possibility that the workers’ struggle could spread to the other provinces and autonomous regions of the country.

For his part, Enrique Santiago, Secretary of State for the « Agenda 2030 » and Secretary General of the Spanish « Communist » Party (PCE) – which is part of Podemos and is therefore in the government with two ministers, including that of labor – had the gall to ask the workers to return to work and to « have confidence in the work being done by the government »!

Among the various factors that contribute to the division of the working class in Spain, it should be noted that in this country, unlike in Italy – where for years there has been an effort to empty them out – there are no national labor contracts, but rather provincial contracts. Which is to say, not even regional contracts, as happens in federal Germany, in the various Länders. Employers and trade unions of the regime take care to conduct negotiations, and strikes, for the renewal of provincial contracts with a time lag, in order to avoid the risk of workers’ unity.

This territorial division – into provinces – of the working class, is reinforced by the historical regionalist division of the Iberian country, sanctioned by the 1978 constitution that gave rise to the autonomous regions.

Autonomism, regionalism and localism are the workhorses of the radical bourgeois left and Spanish opportunism, which they counterpose against the centralism of the bourgeois right, in a game of parties in which the interest of the working class, which is to unify its action, its organizations, its working conditions, at the national and international level, is lost.

For example, in the face of the repressive action of the Spanish bourgeois State, the mayor of Cádiz – elected in the lists of Adelante Cadiz, a political formation of the radical left – has defended the strikers, as an enemy of the central government in Madrid, taking advantage of the opposition between the territory of Cádiz and Madrid, putting in the background the social reality of the opposition between the social classes, working class and bourgeois, for the one between the central State and the local population. They were careful not to point out the only way that could help the metalworkers in their struggle is, in fact, not solidarity in words calling for an end to police repression, which in fact continued, but the extension of the strike to other working class in the rest of the province and the throughout the country.

Even the alternative unions, such as CTM and CGT, do not seem to have freed themselves from these ideological shackles of opportunism, if their common manifesto for a demonstration in support of the strike on Saturday, November 19, called for participation in the name of the « Defense of the Industry of Cadiz », instead of in defense of the working class and its unity, in Spain and internationally.

One of the weaknesses of the strike, in addition to the fundamental one that it was not extended to other sectors of workers and provinces, was that the direct employees of large contractors did not join the strike. CCOO and UGT were careful not to promote such actions, always hiding behind the fact that the conditions of employment of these workers are not defined in the provincial contract but in company contracts. In other words, they sanctioned the divisions among workers, a benefit to the bosses, with their union action.

A strong point of the strike, however, was the solidarity received from the working class in the city and the province – with demonstrations in Seville as well – which could not materialize in a city or regional general strike because of the lack of a sufficiently strong class union organization.

The pickets and clashes between workers and police were joined by young proletarians and the unemployed, in a province with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, about 23%. The contractual precariousness, which as mentioned concerns about 70% of the metalworkers in the province, a powerful weapon of blackmail by the employers in order to better exploit the workers, in the strike turned into a factor in favor of the workers’ struggle, leading to the involvement of not only of the contingently employed workers but also of those temporarily unemployed, all aware of the fact that precisely because of the uncertainty of employment, and therefore of wages, a strong increase in wages is even more necessary and vital for the survival of working class families. The contractual precariousness, in perspective, will end up giving strikes the character of a revolt, as we have seen in the 10 days of proletarian struggle in Cadiz!

On the 10th day of the strike, Thursday, November 25, in a meeting that began in the evening and ended at night, CCOO, UGT and Femca finally reached an agreement for a 2% increase for each year. Without waiting for it to be presented and sanctioned or rejected by workers’ assemblies, they called off the strike the next morning. The CMT and CGT were immediately opposed and called for the continuation of the struggle, but this only happened in a couple of companies. They then denounced how in many companies there were no votes to approve the agreement, due to the simple fact that the two unions of the regime have no affiliated workers.

The agreement signed is a middle ground between the initial proposal of the employers (1.5%) and the demands of CCOO and UGT. It is a small breath of fresh air for the workers but does not appear satisfactory given the strength of the struggle.

The strike was in any case a great example for all workers, it gave morale to the forces of confrontational unionism in the struggle to free the working class in Spain and in every country from the control of regime unionism and to rebuild the class unions!