19
CCOO had been mobilizing workers actively since 1982 in opposition to the government policies and had
called general strikes.
Given these grim prospects, Felipe González decided to intervene and met separately with the leaders of
the UGT, Nicolás Redondo, and the CEOE, José María Cuevas, to try to achieve consensus. Two major
issues hindered the conclusion of the agreement: The demand by the CEOE to eliminate the required
administrative authorization for mass dismissals and the inclusion in the agreement of a clause stating that
the government should align the Spanish legislation on dismissals with the European Community's
(Domínguez 1990, 93). Finally, the participants worked out an ambiguous formula of this clause that was
accepted by the UGT.
28
The Acuerdo Económico y Social (AES), was signed by the government, the UGT,
and the CEOE on October 9, 1984. It would last for two years (1985-1986). This would be the last
concertation agreement signed by the Socialist government.
One of the major impetuses behind the concertation process had been the desire to come up with
mechanisms that would help consolidate the new democratic regime. Concertation was viewed as a way to
mitigate labor conflict and thereby placate the most extremist sectors of the right and the military
(Foweraker 1987, 61). When the socialists won the elections of 1982 with an overwhelming majority, the
change in power was viewed as the cornerstone of the transition process. During the second half of the
1980s three major developments had an impact on the unions' strategies: The approval of the Union
Freedom Act, the process of re-industrialization, and the 1986 elections to the work councils (see Royo
2000).The combination of these facts and the government economic policies led to the end of the first
phase of social bargaining and a sharp increase in labor conflict.
The socialist government insisted that the failure of concertation had to be attributed to the unions. It
accused them of irresponsible wage demands and attacked them for defending very limited interests: Those
of current workers with indefinite contracts and relatively high salaries and benefits. Unions for their part
blamed the government, arguing that it had failed to deliver on its promises. For unions, concertation was
also an instrument of solidarity and income redistribution. The union leaders rejected the government
accusations, and emphasized that they also defended the interests of the less favored and the unemployed.
The breakdown in the relationship between the UGT and the PSOE culminated with the organization of a
general strike in 1988 that marked a point of no return for the unions in their relationship with the parties
(see Royo 2000, Gillespie 1990).
29
This new phase was marked by the increasing autonomy of unions from
political parties. The next few years would be characterized by increasing labor mobilizations and a
contentious relationship among the social actors.
Conclusion
The success of social bargaining processes in Spain during the transition to democracy suggests pointed
lessons to the comparative study of social concertation and its impact on democratic consolidation. First, a
key argument of this paper has been that the relationship of unions and parties during the authoritarian
period was an essential variable in conditioning relationships and strategies in the post- authoritarian
period. The examination of the Spanish case has shown that labor strategies can take different routes after
the establishment of democratic institutions. In Spain the nature of unions' alliances with political parties
during the first years of democracy conditioned unions' strategies and their stance towards social
bargaining. As we have seen, what was peculiar about the Spanish industrial relation system at that time
was not so much the level of politicization of union activities, but the degree of political party influence. In
many occasions this factor led to the instrumentalization of the trade union confederations by political
parties and the subordination of trade unionism to the political and electoral strategies of the parties. This
has led to what some scholars have referred to as a "political party based process of program formulation"
(Stoleroff 1988, 17). This process has the social actors to direct their demands at the state, which became a
28
During my interviews with Nicolás Redondo, former secretary general of the UGT, and with Fernando Moreno and
Fabián Marquez from the CEOE in December 1996, they all emphasized that this clause was the most important point
of dispute between the UGT and the CEOE. They also stated that the interpretation of the article was one of the major
reasons behind the CEOE's decision to repudiate the agreement later on, and the employers' association's decision to
reject the possibility of reaching new agreements with UGT in 1987.
29
This dispute provoked an institutional and organic rupture between the union and the party, marked by the
establishment of incompatibility rules preventing PSOE members to have positions of responsibility within UGT
(Paramio 1993, 533).
Convention