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Striking to renew: Basque Unions’ Organizing
Strategies and Use of the Strike-Fund
Jon Las Heras
jon.lasheras@ehu.eus / @jonlhc
Lluis Rodríguez
Lluis.ra.eco@gmail.com / @lluisraeco
Abstract1
‘There is no union renewal without striking’ has been the underlying logic driving
collective bargaining and union renewal dynamics in the Basque Country. This article
shows how the Basque sovereigntist unions ELA and LAB have formed a ‘counter-
power’ bloc, in opposition to CCOO and UGT that are more prone to engage into social
dialogue. The formers’ renewal strategy based on organising workers ‘deeply’ –
especially with ELA’s recurrent use of a strike-fund that fosters membership
participation and affiliation through confederal solidarity – has altered union politics in
the Basque Country. This has produced very high strike rates since the 2000s, perhaps
the highest in Europe, and a ‘spill over’ effect that polarises union alliances
substantially. The article brings out the question of how unions could possibly locate
industrial conflict within their renewal strategies and transform their organisations
accordingly. Methodologically, the article contributes to the literature on strikes by
underlining the importance of studying strikes critically, as a conscious collective
process, in order to understand that their uneven development also derives from
concrete unions’ strategies.
Keywords: Strikes, union renewal, strike-fund, Basque unionism
Introduction
‘There is no renewal without striking’ has been the underlying logic driving collective
bargaining and union renewal in the Basque Country for the last two decades. This
autonomous community located in the north of Spain records very high industrial
conflict rates, and perhaps, the highest in Europe after certain unions embraced strikes
as a recurring bargaining tool and core component of their renewal strategies. Striking
is a recurring disruptive form to express workers’ grievances through the forced
stoppage of economic activity that necessarily politicises labour relations (Kelly 2015).
However, the literature studying its evolution shows a significant decay across Europe
since the 1980s, including Spain, ‘the champion of the striking league’ (Gall 2013;
Vandaele 2016). The ‘globalized quiescence’ (Piazza 2005) has encouraged some to
start considering the study of other ‘non-overt’ forms of industrial conflict to show that
capitalism is inherently conflictive and disruption prone (Hebdon 2005; Godard 2011;
1 Original version published at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjir.12582
2014). However, this methodological turn may undermine the possibility of engaging
with existing union renewal strategies critically, and understand the importance of
industrial conflict in the empowerment of the working class. Commodity exchange,
wage labour and the profit motive, fundamental relations of our society are in
themselves founded upon conflict, and presuppose particular forms of social
domination that push some workers in direct confrontation against others (Silver 2003;
Starosta 2016). Struggle is inherent to capitalism, however, another thing is whether
workers do it consciously and collectively.
To revive the ‘strike debate’ and its importance within union renewal literature, this
article puts an outlier case to the forefront showing that Basque unionism should be
understood differently and, in particular, with respect to other South European industrial
relations models (Vandaele 2011: 16-8; 2016: 284-5). To put the story short, after ten
years of strategic realignment during the 1990s, the alliance that clustered both Basque
sovereigntist (ELA – Euskal Langileen Alkartasuna) and Spanish (CCOO – Comisiones
Obreras – and UGT – Union General de Trabajadores) unions for almost twenty years,
cracked and was eventually dismissed. The rise of the second Basque union (LAB –
Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak) allowed for the two Basque sovereigntist unions to
form a new alliance that stood in opposition to the two main Spanish unions, which
were more inclined to engage into social dialogue and higher-level forms of collective
bargaining as paths to union renewal (e.g. Hamann and Martinez-Lucio 2003; Hamann
2012; Pérez-de-Guzmán et al. 2016; Rigby and García-Calavia 2001). In sharp
contrast to the latter, Basque sovereigntist unions’ bet for securing workplace presence
and holding a more radical positioning towards collective bargaining that understands
striking as a recurrent bargaining tactic required: (i) strengthening confederal
organisational resources like the strike-fund; (ii) developing law, economic and gender
consulting offices to support and defend both workers and the union from possible
counter-attacks; (iii) attaining political autonomy through gaining greater financial
autonomy and depending less on the support from public subsidies; (iv) dismissing
corporatist pacts and social dialogue agreements for not paying-off enough; and (v)
forging new alliances with other radical unions and grass-roots social movements.
Their historical synthesis has paved the way for a form of ‘counter-power’ unionism that
aims at reorganising the rank-and-file deeply (Cregan et al. 2009; Holgate et al. 2018)
in order to be able to confront more.
What the Basque case shows is that a union that locates striking as a necessary
moment/tactic in the overall articulation and advancement of its political strategy is
forced to renew its operating and discursive practices, and developing supplementary
power resources. The different strategic posititioning of the two union-blocs and their
accumulation of confederal resources and struggle experiences has produced an
uneven landscape of industrial conflict in which some unions record substantially
higher strikes than others, whist some defend social dialogue and others dismiss it.
This has become one of the most central aspects around contemporary union politics
in the Basque Country, and moves the debate of union renewal in Spain beyond
‘institutional’ versus ‘social movement’ strategies of the two largest trade unions (e.g.
Hamman and Martinez-Lucio 2003; Hamman 2012; Luque-Balbona and Gonzalez-
Begega 2017) to the concrete form in which the empowerment of the workforce at the
site of production can take place (McAlevey 2016). In this sense, adopting a particular
renewal strategy produces a set of contradictions and challenges that require unions to
transform their internal/external functioning in order to accommodate their reflective
praxis to the newly created environment, that is, unions appear always to be ‘in
transition’ (Fairbrother 2015; Roca and Las Heras 2020): the strategic problem being
whether if the political challenges they have consciously posed to themselves become
true (Badiou 2012) no matter how partial and incomplete these might be.
Parallel, the literature on strike activity does not contemplate strikes as an instrument,
engine or basic pillar for the expansion and renewal of trade unionism, and thus, it has
focused mainly on description and statistical analyses, putting emphasis to
idiosyncratic territorial, institutional, economic or other structural factors to explain
chronological and geographic differences (e.g. Bordogna and Cella 2002; Scheuer
2006; Bordogna 2010; Traxler and Brandl 2010; Godard 2011), rather than resulting
from historically specific strategies towards union renewal.The article contributes thus
both to the literature studying the evolution of strike patterns and to the debates on
union renewal by showing that organising to engage in direct confrontation with capital
determines industrial relations and striking patterns which, in turn, bring new strategic
questions and dilemmas to the fore.
The article first explains the importance of striking and the use of the strike-box for
union renewal purposes, emphasising their strategic liaison in contrast to structuralist
approaches. Then, we swiftly revise the literature on union renewal in the Spanish
context and its limits, before we later discuss the methodology behind strike statistics,
and the official data that has allowed us to build the inter-union comparison in the
Basque Country. After, we explain the formation of the two existing union blocs (the
‘counter-power’ and the ‘social dialogue’ bloc), and their respective deployment of
organisational resources towards the strike-fund. Then we engage with union
specificities, in which ELA emerges as the most conflictive oriented union in collective
bargaining and the tensions that it rises with other unions. Finally, we draw some
methodological and strategic lessons.
Striking and union renewal: what goes first?
It has been argued that industrial conflict must be understood relationally, not as a
‘separate moment’ to which every structural aspect has plotted for, but as a moment in
the transformation of workers’ and unions’ power resources that derives from strategic
interaction (Hodder et al. 2017: 166; Hennebert and Faulkner 2017: 2-6; Lehr et al.
2015: 655-6; Godard 1992: 162). However, if striking is necessarily a ‘voluntary’ and
‘calculative’ act that gives ‘voice to collective grievances’ through the disruption of the
capital valorisation process (Hyman 1973: 17, 66-8), it is surprising how the
comparative literature studying the determinants of strikes has obviated the strategic
component, and instead, has resorted to an ample set of contextual factors (economic,
institutional, legal, etc.) as explanatory mechanisms (e.g. Scheuer 2006: 155-9; Trexler
and Brandl 2010: 530-2; Godard 2011: 287-99).
This methodological approach suffers from structuralist tendencies, and plays down the
ideological and political role of trade unions as ‘swords of justice’, and the importance
that overt forms of struggling have in the conscious determination of organised workers’
interests. In trying to analytically separate contextual factors from workers’ and union
members’ decision making before, during and after striking, they obviate the fact that
‘strikes constitute decisive moments in which the diverging interests of employers and
employees are directly experienced, and in which unions are called on to demonstrate
their effectiveness as collective organizations’ (Dribbusch 2016: 350; Kelly 2015: 720).
When we only focus on explaining which ‘structural factors’ determine the uneven
evolution of strikes – e.g. either might be an economic upswing, technological
innovations or the form in which labour law produces path-dependencies – we implicitly
eliminate the possibility of studying union renewal critically (Vandaele 2016: 279). This
occurs because structuralist approaches presume workers’ interests to be already
determined, that structural conditions always prevail over strategic agency in the
transformation of our social environment (Starosta 2016: 111-3). As Sayer (2010: 65)
puts it, ‘social structures do not endure automatically, they only do so where people
reproduce them; but, in turn, people do not reproduce them automatically and rarely
intentionally’ (also Hyman, 1973: 66-9; Holgate et al. 2018: 602-3). Indeed, a strategic
turn politicises converging or uneven striking patterns, explores their normative
implications, and demands further historical analysis around the reflective praxis that
different social actors uphold. Or in other words, a strategic analysis allows us to
question the various forms in which union struggles unfold so that they may organise
better, if not differently.
More specifically, to wield striking as a recursive bargaining tactic, unions have to
deploy a range of discursive and organisational resources that may not be used for
other purposes. Union renewal literature seeks to study and reflect upon new ways of
affiliating, organising and giving a militant projection to labor action; from there, other
elements are introduced such as the review of the forms of internal and institutional
participation, new forms of recruitment, alliances with social movements at different
spatial scales, etc. (Levesque and Murray 2010; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman
2013). However, this literature has also been criticised for not addressing explicitly the
direct connection between the ‘why to organise’ – which to a great extent is limited to
the achievement of better collective agreements and social rights – with the ‘how to
organise’ – where negotiation and conflict, mainly the strike, are one of the main means
(Fairbrother 2015: 566). Kelly (1998) reminds us, nevertheless, that any positioning
with respect to the dilemma of either pursuing further institutionalisation or rank-and-file
mobilisation should not be conceived dichotomically, as if there were two pure strategic
forms, but rather in a continuum or historical totality. In particular, historical
transformations related to the advancement of neoliberalism undermined the capacity
of unions to resort to institutionalised forms of empowerment, and hollowed out social
dialogue and concertation processes (see section below); and yet, making use of more
traditional ways of collective action like striking would not necessarily either secure the
actual defense of workers’ and union members’ interests unless, perhaps, occurring in
a massive scale (Kelly 1998: 59-63). It is however a fact that more institutionalised and
corporatist industrial relations models tend to record lower strike rates (Kelly 2015: 725)
and that developing overt-forms of class struggle, i.e. workplace-based strikes, may
somehow discursively at odds with defending social dialogue and high-levels of
collective bargaining (Rigby and Aledo 2001; Hamman et al. 2013).
Recently, some anglo-saxon and continental scholars have emphasised strikes as a
fine tactic to augment union power in and through workplace mobilisation (Buttigieg et
al. 2008; Harcourt et al. 2013; Jansen 2014; Kelly 2015; McAlevey 2016; Hodder et al.
2017). Being organisationally prepared for engaging into industrial action may be a
strategic option because striking
‘is not only about the declared objectives of the industrial action. By temporarily
overturning the prerogatives of the company and their immediate managers a
stoppage is frequently also a demonstration that there are limits to what
employees are prepared to accept. Strikes have the potential to allow
employees to experience their collective strength. This is the core of their
importance for building a union presence at the workplace’ (Dribbusch 2016:
350-351).
Resorting to the example of the German service union ver.di, which allocates 8% of its
budget to the provisioning of a strike-fund, Dribbusch shows us how can a union deploy
resources to organise workers in the light of an increasingly fragmented and precarious
collective bargaining setting. In building up a substantive strike-fund, especially if it is
confederal, a union becomes prepared to mobilise a ‘relatively structurally
disempowered’ workforce, sharing a discourse of economic solidarity among its union
members, and hence, confronting and giving solutions to the fact that strikes are a very
problematic tactic when not organised appropriately. Roscigno and Hodson (2004) and
Fowler et al. (2009) explain how important is for striking workers to have direct support
from their unions in (a) economic terms, through the strike-fund that relieves workers
from economic hardship; and, (b) psychologically, as the feeling of solidarity that
emerges from engaging in a collective process of ‘self-determination’ diminishes
workers’ stress and feelings of atomisation. Therefore, and albeit there is no
unidirectional causality between striking and union membership because defeats may
have very lasting negative repercussions in the morale of the militancy, a strike-fund
may encourage union affiliation since the union can present itself as a reliable
organisation which, and complementary to its legal and discursive guidance, helps
workers economically to last longer when striking in the support of their particular
demands (Dribbusch 2016: 352-354; Hodder et al. 2017: 182; Cregan 2013: 3372-
3374).
Redirecting organisational resources to the purpose of striking already presupposes
that ‘union presence’ at the workplace is an indispensable component in the renewal
strategy of any union (Elorrieta 2017: 170-171), or that unions must aim at organising
the workforce ‘deeply’ if they want to succeed. This implies ‘engaging and activating
people who may not initially agree but who, through a process of collective organizing
and the development of grassroots leaders, begin to self-identify as part of a
community with a shared objective in seeking to challenge injustice’ (Holgate et al.
2018: 600; also Cregan et al. 2009; López-Andreu 2019b). By addressing and
incorporating effectively the demands of both unionised and non-unionised workers,
the union becomes empowered, functioning and responding to new challenges
differently, and strengthening the strategic coherence in and through which both union
leaders and its membership intervene in the contradictory regulation of capitalism
(Hyman 2012; Fairbrother 2015). Thus, it is only through the concrete unfolding of
unions’ capacity to transform their environment – i.e. by augmenting class solidarity
bonds within and outside the union – that the coherence and effective use of the strike-
fund is checked strategically.
Empowering the workforce ‘from below’ also brings the possibility of introducing the
debate of economic democracy because workers, no matter how partially, become
directly involved in the decisions taking place at the centre of production through their
negative to continue working (see McIlroy 2012: 65). Their immediate interests are a
bargaining coin in the negotiations, perhaps triggering improvements in wages and
working standards, or transforming decision making procedures that once neglected
direct participation (Hyman 1973: 44-51). In fact, when strikes were a ‘fashionable’
tactic during the 20th century, and unions built up significant strike-funds to support their
members, corporations seriously feared for their political and financial stability (Fuess
1990; Darlington 2013). In turn, managers have had to work out multiple methods –
from worker co-opting practices (Currie et al. 2017), to the establishment of insurance
funds (Hirsch 1969; Goerke 2000) – in order to mitigate their ideological and economic
impact.
Resorting to an effective strike-fund may, thus, become an organisational resource in
the strategic debates around union renewal because: (i) it formalises the fact that
engaging into industrial action can be a desirable and recurrent tactic for the militancy;
(ii) it forces unions to transform their overall functioning so that there is a certain
operational and discursive coherence; and, (iii) it legitimises unions’ role in effectively
advancing and defending workers’ demands through conflict. The transformative
potential of the strike-funds for union renewal purposes remains, unfortunately, a
largely unexplored issue.2 The strike-renewal relationship should not nevertheless be
understood uni-directionally, since power relations are expressed through concrete
material relations between social actors who give meaning to them, but cannot be
encapsulated only in them. Thus, union renewal cannot be determined absolutely or
discretely because it is a contradictory process in the unfolding of workers’ and unions’
power open to critique and further transformation (Fairbrother 2015: 572-3; Author(s)
XXXX). This implies that any renewal strategy cannot be successful completely since
the answer to whether if a strategy is ‘successful’ at all can only be determined
heuristically or, that is, when the contradiction has already been transcended
historically (Ollman 2003; Starosta 2016). Nevertheless, the corollary of this line of
argumentation is that those unions who may conjuncturally seek to renew and
transform their practices through a ‘deep organising’ strategy that mobilises union
resources to adopt more inclusive and confrontational tactics when bargaining – i.e. by
embracing a particular truth (Badiou 2012) – will logically produce higher rates of
industrial conflict vs other unions that do not conceive union renewal equally and
deploy less efforts to its pursue. The strikes statistics shown in the forthcoming sections
are a good proof of that and enrich the analyses on strike patterns that have
predominantly left union politics unexplored.
2 For example, Dribbusch (2016: 353) does not problematise the uneven evolution of IG-Metall and ver.di
towards industrial conflict in strategic terms, but instead argues that diverting striking patterns result only
from different economic sector challenges (see also Martens and Pulignano 2008 in next section).
The Spanish model of industrial relations and the strategic ambiguity of CCOO
and UGT
The Spanish legal-system of industrial relations was established during the democratic
transition. In spite labour movements being important triggers for the constitution of a
liberal democracy in Francoist Spain, most of their organisations were relatively
abandoned from the political/corporatist arena, except the social democratic UGT
(Unión General de Trabajadores) which intervened with the support of the socialist
party in outlining the overall regulatory framework. The Workers’ Statute of 1980
(Estatuto de Trabajadores) established a dual mechanism of union representation that
underpinned a semi-centralised structure of collective bargaining in comparison to
other European systems (Alos et al. 2015). Worker representation procedures to
engage in collective bargaining were articulated (and still remain) around two major
pillars. On the one hand, through the dual mechanism of ‘unitary representation’ at the
works council and the ‘union branch’, workers can ‘voice’ their grievances at the
workplace scale, thus, following Comisiones Obreras’ (CCOO) historical role in
organising the rank-and-file during Francoism ‘from below’. On the other hand, through
worker representation at supra-company scales, after trade union elections are
organised at the workplace, union officials engage into collective bargaining at the
representative territorial scale (either provincial, autonomous community or state
scale). This representational and legitimacy structure followed UGT’s aspirations,
following the guidance of their German counterparts, in organising the working class
‘from above’, that is, as a united and coherent corporation. In particular, it established a
10% vote-share threshold to engage into state-level collective bargaining and social
dialogue rounds, and 15% at the sub-national level, at the autonomous community and
provincial levels. Further, the Workers Statute established that any collective
agreement functioned under the erga omnes clause, i.e. a collective agreement that
has been signed by the representative majority is legally binding for all workers and
companies irrespective their membership to any organisation. This historically resulted
in an increasing hierarchisation and concentration of collective bargaining that
complemented social dialogue and state-pacts: it was in the hands of a lesser number
of actors to ensure that the conditions of the workforce could be regulated rather than
by making the rank-and-file active in the collective bargaining process (Fernández-
Rodríguez et al. 2016).
Since the mid-1980s, the bargaining structure has experienced substantial
flexibilisation and restructuring reforms that have eroded the sphere of action that
originally became so important for UGT and CCOO: the sector agreements that cover
around 50 – 60% of the workforce (Alos et al. 2015; Lopez-Andreu 2019a). This poses
an important strategic question to the two unions since the fundamental institutional
sphere that legitimises their role as class unions has been under constant threat during
the last three decades; their capacity of intervention and legal coverage resides more
on the particularities of different economic sectors and their history of industrial conflict
than on the ‘formally homogenising’ force of the legal framework (cf. Jódar et al. 2011;
Köhler and Calleja-Jiménez 2012; Author(s) XXXX).
Turning to the trade unions, Spanish unionism has been argued to represent a form of
‘weak corporatism’ for combining, rather ambiguously, two different strategies that
implied workforce and social mobilisation with the production of state-level social or
corporatist pacts. Its development has not been a linear process though, and these two
unions have followed at least three major strategic shifts during the last 40 years. First,
during the democratic transition the production of an institutionalised framework that
was more suitable to UGT’s corporatist interests pushed CCOO to engage in national-
level pacts and abandon its rank-and-file mobilisation and communist ideology so that it
would not remain institutionally marginalised. Second, the signature of national pacts
during the early 1980s that aimed at preserving corporate profitability and secure
employment were feeble (deindustrialisation and privatisation of major companies,
accompanied with the integration into the European Single Market increased
unemployment and labour precariousness), hence, weakening trade unions and
encouraging them to distance themselves from their allied political parties, form a
unitary block and reject socialist government’s policies for around six years, 1986 –
1992. Third, both unions realised however that confrontation was not bringing them too
many benefits whilst the neoliberal project was becoming real. This underpinned the
progressive adoption during the mid-1990s of a rather ambivalent ‘union renewal’
strategy that combined ‘social dialogue’ at macro-levels with the contingent
organisation of industrial conflict – mainly in the form of general strikes as a form of
‘contention politics’. The institutional role of UGT and CCOO as class organisations
would be legitimised then through both: (i) their capacity to sporadically mobilise the
rank-and-file, and (ii) in their production of overarching collective and social
agreements that could bring few benefits to the working classes (Hamman and
Martinez-Lucio, 2003; Hamman et al. 2013; Luque-Balbona, 2010; Luque-Balbona and
Gonzalez-Begega 2017). Such strategy has been recurrent during the 2008 financial
crisis and its aftermath (Pohl, 2018), but with questionable results since it has not
augmented union affiliation, neither the trust of the general workforce (Molina and
Barranco 2016), nor that of other labour organisations and radical social movements
(Pérez-de-Guzmán et al. 2016; Las Heras and Ribera-Almandoz 2017; Roca and Las
Heras 2020).
Crucially, the recurrent use to general strikes as a way to show union strength has
been criticised for hiding unions’ weaknesses when organising an increasingly
fragmented and precarious workforce (Rigby and Aledo 2001: 292-294; Hamann et al.
2013: 1049-1051). In fact, high Spanish strike records can be understood as the
opposite, as a recurred and predictable tactic in sector mobilisations that appear to
generate a sentiment of class solidarity through the mobilisation of relatively few
strongholds (Rigby and Aledo 2001: 291-300; Vandaele 2011: 17). Moreover, the
recent rise of industrial conflict during the crisis has been argued to be nothing more
than a reactive response to growing corporate dominance in the implementation of
internal and external flexibility measures, against dismissals and factory closures (Pohl
2018: 33-37).
The adoption of defensive and corporatist positions should not be understood
dichotomically (Kelly 1998), that UGT and CCOO may be classified as unions that only
embrace social dialogue as the unique way towards renewal. Quite the opposite, their
historical transformations and more recent rank-and-file mobilisations against austerity
(such as the ‘green-, white- or purple-waves’; ‘las mareas’) are a good proof of their
potential for change. Moreover, ongoing debates around the need to organise effective
strike-funds show that being prepared for industrial conflict has not been completely
ruled out as a renewal strategy. However, their repeated signing of various social pacts
during and after the last economic crisis that fostered wage repression and greater
flexibility in exchange for maintaining institutional legitimacy and social peace, and
which replicates other European national trade union practices (cf. Tassinari and
Dagherty, 2020), hinders any significant and generalised strategic turn.
Methodological notes on strike-statistics and inter-union comparisons
Lyddon (2007: 28-33) outlines three major statistical indicators to understand strike
activity, and which have been applied systematically to this study: (i) the number of
strikes as the fundamental expression of conflict, but which requires further
qualification through (ii) the number of workplaces and workers involved that express
the size of a conflict and, as well as, the calling and organising capacity of the union,
and (iii) the days lost per strike or days-not-worked (DNW) per 1.000 employees to
measure their economic impact (see also Bordogna 2010: 588). With the combination
of these three set of indicators one gets an approximated picture of how recurrent,
extensive and deep strikes are within a given territory. Alas, studying and comparing
the evolution of industrial conflict in advanced capitalist countries is problematic
because: there are no two single European countries gathering data the same way
(Dribbusch and Vandaele 2016); there is little reliable and consistent information
throughout long time series (Gall 2013); and strikes take place in a complex and
dynamic environment, thus, explaining strikes requires more than ‘massaging numbers’
and engage into historical qualitative analysis to avoid arbitrary statistical comparisons
(Franzosi 1995: 372-379; Edwards 1992: 372-375).
Perhaps it is more problematic the fact that the literature tends to describe and
compare territories, especially nation-states, instead of producing disaggregated
analyses of union activity (Vandaele 2016: 279). In our view, this ‘statist veil’ impedes
any strategic critique since it systematically plays down complex and different forms of
agency in favour of state structures or institutional configurations that take certain
forms of social interaction as given (Herod 2011). While it may be justified for those
territories in which state administrations do not make any statistical differentiation in
between trade unions (Dribbusch and Vandaele 2016: 418), it is certainly an important
limitation for those studies that have relied on union databases to synthesise nation-
wide statistics. For example, if strike patterns have evolved and shifted among
economic sectors and territories in Belgium, the question of whether if all unions use
their strike-funds in the same way seems appropriate or, perhaps more interestingly,
whether if Belgium can be categorised as a ‘conflictive country’ due to the extensive
use of strike-funds which are, quite ironically, the very ultimate source of the statistics
themselves (e.g. Martens and Pulignano 2008).
Importantly, ‘in Spain, information on strikes is collected by the Ministry of Employment,
based on monthly data directly gathered by its regional agencies from companies,
employers’ associations or unions, as well as by monitoring strikes’ (Dribbusch and
Vandaele 2016: 416), hence, allowing the production of rich strike statistics. Available
data suffers nevertheless from two technical limitations that undermine a more
complete inter-union strike activity comparison. On the one hand, a significant number
of strikes are formally called by the works council in a joint basis (see section above), in
spite the fact that it is the major representative organ through which different unions
have presence and negotiate at company level. Most representative unions are likely to
have more seats at the works councils and, hence, are likely to be those leading any
conflict (albeit not necessarily). In that sense, aggregated statistics suffer from either
levelling-down or levelling-up unions’ positioning, as they conflate the absolute number
of the strikes organised by the unions regardless their negotiating role as ‘leaders’ or
‘followers’.
In order to be able to shed light on unions’ inclination towards striking we have
synthesised ‘single strike statistics’ as a proxy or, that is, we have calculated how
much unions call for strikes without the involvement of any other union or non-
unionised workers. We believe this to be appropriate because, and as it is shown by
the variable ‘proportion of DNW when organizing alone’, some unions are substantially
more passive and dependent than others when calling for a strike. This initial analysis
also excludes inter-sectorial comparisons because all the unions studied are organised
confederally: they are present in both the private and public sector, and within the
private sector they all have relatively homogeneous representation and presence in
construction, manufacturing and services sectors. Trying to provide detailed account of
whether if a specific union is more inclined to engage with or resort from the
mobilisation of workers located in one specific sector would imply further contextual
and union membership analysis that falls beyond the scope of the present article. In
that sense, the striking statistics presented below aim at synthesising unions’ strategic
disposition and confederal capacity.
On the other hand, the Basque regional bureau gathering the data follows the
methodology established by the Ministry of Labour, in Madrid. The latter has no
sufficient sub-state sensibility and conflates trade union statistics. LAB is currently the
second most representative union in the Basque Country (i.e. more than 19% votes in
regional union elections) and is the second largest in terms of size (around 39.000
affiliates), but there has still been no methodological update to produce a separate
accounting for LAB, and thus, their strike record appears undifferentiated from that of
other smaller Basque unions. These unions, nevertheless, have shown important signs
of conflict (cf. López-Andreu 2019b) and are not small enough not to have statistical
repercussions in our comparative analysis. These smaller unions are both confederal
(like ESK – Ezker Sindikalaren Konbergentzia – with 5.000 members), and sector
unions like that of education (STEILAS with 5,000 members). According to one regional
administrative working on strike statistics, the strikes of these smaller unions would
count no less than 10% of the strikes attributed to LAB. This is worth noting because,
while it is not as important in the differentiation between the two larger union blocs
(counter-power vs. social dialogue) since most of these unions belong themselves to
the counter-power bloc, it is problematic when trade unions are analysed separately as
in the last section. Bestowing LAB higher conflict rates diffuses the on-going strategic
tensions between ELA and LAB towards the level of collective bargaining and the use
of the strike-fund.
The formation of two strategic blocs and the organisation and use of the Strike-
funds in the Basque Country
Since the mid-1990s, there has been a crucial change in union alliances in the Basque
Country. Until that moment, however, and since the early 1980s, the union membership
and electoral sum of ELA, CCOO and UGT forged a majoritarian alliance that settled
both collective bargaining patterns and the debates on the regional social dialogue
bodies at a period of difficult industrial restructuring. In the 1990s, when the Basque
economy was fully immersed into the European markets and global value chains,
several factors forged a strategic division in between the newly emerging ‘counter-
power’ bloc, led by ELA and LAB, and the ‘social dialogue’ bloc formed by CCOO and
UGT that replicated their state-level confederations’ strategies (see discussion above).
The main driver was the overall strategic repositioning of ELA in relation to the problem
of union renewal, thus, questioning the role that industrial conflict should play in
collective bargaining (discussed in more detailed below), the usefulness of social
dialogue, the importance for a union to achieve financial autonomy, and, the limits that
the Spanish labour law imposes on Basque unions’ sovereignty. Such strategic
realignment lasted more than a decade and was formalised in ELA’s 2000 Confederal
Congress; ithas been theorised as the adoption of a strategy of ‘counter-power’
(Letamendia 2004; Elorrieta 2011; 2017; Kortabarria 2016).
Complementarily and as crucial in the formation of the ‘counter-power’ bloc was LAB's
affiliate and electoral growth (in 1995 it passed the necessary 15% representativeness
threshold that allows to participate in higher bodies), and their questioning and revision
of union action within the limitations of the Spanish industrial relations model (Bustillo
2007; Majuelo 2000). In the 2000s, such strategic recalibrations were reinforced and
completed with: ELA’s and LAB’s departure from the institutional participation organs
that were fashion in the rest of Spain (i.e. the Council of Labour Relations, the Social
and Economic Council, the Labour Health Institute, etc. see Hamann and Martinez-
Lucio 2003); their refusal to participate in other social dialogue initiatives promoted by
the Basque Government and the employers’ federation Confebask since 2008; and
building alternative alliances with other radical unions, feminist, ecologist and grass
root social movements to transcended the restrictive politics of ‘industrial legality’ (see
Letamendia 2015).Therefore, in strategic terms, what the various unions forming the
‘counter-power’ bloc share is:3
(1) their critical political position with the capitalist system tout court, and their
claim to regain further territorial sovereignty and eco-socialist and feminist
forms of socioeconomic reproduction as ideal projections towards a future
society;
(2) a more combative and vindictive position that openly questions prevailing
other regional and Spanish state forms of social dialogue, which
consequently leads to
(3) a reconfigured position in collective bargaining at sector and
company/workplace scales in which they aim at maximizing the results of
industrial conflict and strike activity;
(4) having an organisational instrument that allows them to economically
support their membership when striking, i.e. the strike-fund;
3 See the confederal congresses of ELA-2017, LAB-2017, ESK-2019, STEILAS-2018.
(5) charging higher union dues which provide greater financial and political
autonomy.
The relative weight that both strategic blocs have in the Basque territory is understood
better with a more precise presentation of their organisations and their representational
shares (see Table 1). In the ‘counter-power’ bloc, we find ELA as the largest union with
around 90,000 affiliates and 41'68% of representation (7.084 delegates) in 2019. In
second place LAB with 39,000 affiliates and 19’1% representation (3.247 delegates),
while with less weight both ESK (5.000 affiliates; and around 240 delegates) and
STEILAS (5.000 affiliates; and circa 210 delegates) are located in this bloc too. Their
sum adds to 63% representation and circa 62’6% of union affiliation. For its part, the
‘social dialogue’ bloc is made up of the Spanish CCOO-Euskadi with 48,000 members
and 18.3% representation (3.113 delegates), and UGT-Euskadi with 35,000 members
and 10.4% representation (1.769 delegates). In total they add up to 28’72% of
representation and 37’4% of affiliation approximately, and they have been shrinking
slowly but steadily since the 1990s. They are characterised by a social democratic
political position sometimes with a discourse on the left, with a less demanding union
orientation in collective bargaining and reaching agreements without recurring to
industrial conflict or strike (see Author(s) XXXX; YYYY). In addition, both unions have a
constant participation in regional social dialogue bodies and benefit from governmental
funding which, according to Calleja (2016: 246-247) and Luque-Balbona (2010: 254-
255; 307-311), undermines their capacity to embrace industrial action as a recursive
method of bargaining. As it was explained before, none of the unions deploys
confederal nor federal resources systematically to the organisation of strikes.
ELA dates the creation of the strike-fund (named Greba Kutxa or Erresistentzia Kutxa)
to 1978. It establishes that it will start aiding members monetarily in strikes of a
duration of three or more days, but without the requirement of being consecutively but
belonging to the same conflict instead, and paying all of those DNW. The economic aid
comfortably exceeds the Minimum Wage for the commitment that the fund should cover
at least 105% of the annual legal minimum. More precisely, the amounts for the year
2019 are the following: (1) a “regular fund” consisting of €1.102,50 per month; (2) a
“reinforced fund” of +15%, that is €1.267,87 per month, for those companies in which at
least 35% of the staff is affiliated to ELA; and (3) the “strategic fund” for those strikes
and sectors considered to be strategic, and in which the support can reach up to
€2,205.00 per month. In any case, the cash compensation may never exceed the
monthly net salary, including extraordinary payments and they are net payments after
income tax (Ispizua, 2019: 14-15). Having a strike-fund of this type is only possible
thanks to a high union fee (€21,77 per month, the highest in Spain), and because the
union allocates 25% of their union fees to support the strike-fund, that is around €5 per
month per affiliate. The high quota also supports the financial autonomy of the union (it
self-finances more than 94,44% of its activity), and allows ELA not to depend on
external revenues such as state subsidies. This financial autonomy provides, and
unlike other unions tied to state funding derived from social dialogue, the necessary
political autonomy to establish a confronting strategy against both neoliberal
governments and employer associations.
In the case of LAB, the strike-fund (Borroka Kutxa) was created in 2010 (LAB, 2018),
and it has relatively similar characteristics and aims, although it is more restrictive than
ELA’s, establishing that it will start aiding members monetarily at the fourth day of
striking and not being retroactive. The maximum threshold (in 2018) is set at €25 per
day or €750 per month (net after income tax), and it only starts covering salary losses
when the net salary falls below €1.500 per month, paying only the difference with that
cap. The strike payment is not indexed to the minimum salary. LAB’s union fee is
around €17,61 per month. On the other hand, ESK created its resistance-box
(Elkartasun Fondoa) in 2005. It will start aiding members monetarily in strikes of a
duration of more than two days. The highest payment is equal to legal Minimum Wage
(€900 per month, €30 a day, 2019) before income tax. Union fee is established at
around €15 per month. These three strike-funds are managed confederally, in contrast
to the rest of the European unions who have them (Germany, Denmark, Sweden) but
are controlled by their federations, excluding the Belgium ACV/CSV and
ACLVB/CGSLB (Elorrieta, 2011: 620).
Table 1. Union membership, delegates and representativeness in the Basque Country. Source:
Various union congresses, union leaflets, newspapers and Basque Industrial Relations Council.
* Without USO, CGT, CNT, etc.
With respect to strike activity, the existing chasm between both blocs is obvious. First,
in between 2001 and 2018, a cross-section analysis shows that Basque unions are on
average more capable and willing to: (i) strike in more companies (747 to 154) despite
CCOO and UGT mobilise more companies per strike (51 to 25); (ii) organise more
workers (3.683 to 366); and (iii) have a much deeper economic impact as a result of
the stoppages (14.353 to 447 days-not-worked). The differences on the DNW are
significant, as they mean that ELA and LAB have an economic impact of 32 times more
than CCOO and UGT when striking, and in spite the fact that the counter-power bloc
has only 1.66 times more members, and 2.2 times more union delegates than the
social dialogue approximately. Another fact worth mentioning is that the counter-power
bloc is capable of having a larger economic impact per strike (534 to 64 DNW) and last
more (24 days to 12), thus leading to a higher rate of DNW per striker involved (4,9 to
1,7).
Second, analysing the statistics longitudinally, one finds a major self-reinforcing trend in
each bloc that corresponds to their positioning towards the economic crisis and the
various labour reforms that have been implemented in Spain (see López-Andreu
2019a). Within the ‘counter-power’ bloc we can see that ELA and LAB have been
clearly capable of socialising and expanding industrial conflict among the workforce.
This derives from a period of economic crisis in which unions have made use of work-
stoppages in order to halt industrial restructuring (Pohl, 2018) but not only, as two
recent examples presented below show. For the period 2010-2018, the absolute
number of companies involved, the number of companies involved per strike, the
absolute number of workers involved and workers involved per strike have increased
by 8.3 times, 4.6 times, 60% and 6% respectively, whilst the absolute number of DNW
has increased by 49%. In the meantime, the ‘social dialogue’ bloc has seen its impact
reduced, and for the same period the statistics show a reduction of 69%, 68% and 10%
respectively, whilst for the number of workers involved per strike there is a rise of 30%
whilst for the DNW there is a reduction of 17%. Or put it simply, aggregated ‘single
union strike’ data shows that the ‘counter-power’ bloc has been willing to challenge
more enthusiastically the economic crisis and corporate restructuring than the ‘social
dialogue’ bloc in and through industrial action.
Two recent examples may be worth mentioning to show the strength of the ‘counter-
power’ bloc’s strategy. First, in 2016, after 41 days of indefinite strike, workers at the
museum of fine arts of Bilbao affiliated to ELA and LAB managed to increase their
gross-wages 100%, by leveling their base-salary up from 10.400€ to 20.500€;
introduce a subrogation clause in the collective agreement to protect workers from
outsourcing; and to block the arbitrary reduction of salaries and working conditions that
the 2012 labour reform permits. Second, the 2016-2017 sector strike of the residences
for the elderly in Biscay – with 5.000 workers – lasted 374 days. ELA had a majority in
the sector, and their aim was to attain a minimum salary of €1.200, and a maximum
working week of 35 hours, apart from other social benefits. The resilience of the
workers and the various mobilisations forced the employers’ association to sign the
agreement. The victory was similar to another strike in which hotel room-cleaners
affiliated to ELA stroke for 41 days and won wage increases of more than 40%. Both
have been exemplary within service, precarious, feminised and migrant dominated
sectors.
Table 2. Annual average strike activity in the Basque Country per union-bloc when organising alone for the years 2001-2018. Source: Basque labour
department. Own calculations.
16
The union map in the Basque Country, wherein the sovereigntist ELA and LAB hold the
representative majority in contrast to CCOO and UGT (Table 1), occurs in a labour
relations framework that is regulated at state level and which it is source of strong
disputes between both blocs. However, it is neither the institutional or legal framework
that determines the ‘political and social strategy’ of the unions per se, but rather their
‘counter-power’ positioning that, and by making plausible and effective an informed and
economically supported workplace-based collective bargaining strategy, generates a
certain ‘organisational dynamism’ that aims to accommodate to historical changes that
consisted in displacing unions from the workplace and inhibiting their potentiality to
struggle collectively (Elorrieta 2017: 243-5; Author(s) XXXX; YYYY). Crucially, in
between 2008 and 2018, the ‘counter-power’ bloc has relatively maintained its
membership (only -5.3%), despite the reduction of total elected delegates due to lay-
offs and industrial restructuring, and gained electoral representativeness (+2.73%).
Meanwhile, the social dialogue bloc has lost 16.2% of its membership and 3.76% of its
representativeness, whilst as at their Spanish confederal level, CCOO and UGT have
lost around 22% of their membership. This shows that in times of economic hardship
and fiscal austerity, Basque sovereigntist unions have shown more reliability and
membership attachment than the Spanish confederations (for a more detailed
discussion on Spanish trends see Alos et al 2015).
As a result, and in line with a report that PriceWaterHouseCoopers published in 2017
for the Basque Government and the employers’ association, the president of the Biscay
employers’ association has attacked ELA and LAB for ‘seeking to return 100 years in
history [and recovering] a discourse of striking and struggling’. They have also accused
them of ‘corrupting the use of strikes’, for not ‘using them as last resort, but
beforehand’, in order to negotiate stronger and, thus, ‘to force companies to accept
their demands’ (CEBEK 2019). For the Basque employers’ association the current
context is challenging because ELA and LAB ‘politicise’ collective bargaining, ‘they
reduce the possibilities of reaching an agreement and they limit corporations’ room for
manouvre’, thus, making it ‘much more difficult to implement the 2012 labour reform in
comparison to other Spanish regions’ in which these two unions are not present
(PriceWaterHouseCoopers, 2017: 22-24; 30). ELA and LAB have become an obstacle
to the extent that the Basque employers’ association called for their illegalisation few
years ago, whilst the legal restrictions regarding minimum services when striking have
become more pervasive (on the latter. also. Stevens and Templeton 2016; Hogedahl
and Ibsen, 2017). Regardless, ELA’s and LAB’s legitimacy among the workforce is
more consolidated than ever, as their affiliation numbers and their electoral
representativeness grows, and to the detriment of others unions that have not
reconsidered their strategic positioning in times of hardship (recall Table 1). The
combatant orientation of Basque unions towards collective bargaining, accompanied by
their political and financial autonomy that supports the wide use of the strike-fund,
determine an industrial relations model in the Basque Country which has no
comparative references in Southern Europe:
17
Figure 1. Days-not-worked (DNW) per 1,000 employees in Europe. Sources: ETUI Database,
Spanish Ministry of Labour and Luque-Balbona et al. (2008: 122). Own calculations.
According to the latest accessible official statistics presented in Figure 1, and taking
into account that Greece remains outside any possible comparison due to flawed or
inexistent statistics (Dribbush and Vandaele 2016: 413), we can easily see that the
Basque Country ranks first at the European strike league for the period 1990-2017 with
an average of 366 days-not-worked (DNW), doubling the numbers of Spain (181), the
second in the list.4 Apart from the obvious ‘structural differences’ in between Southern,
Central and Eastern European countries (for a more detailed analysis see Vandaele
2016; Gall 2013), there are two facts worth noticing. First, that in the time-span of
2000-2009, when western countries experienced relatively stable economic growth
rates, industrial action shrank considerably across Europe, including Spain, due to the
steady disempowerment of trade unions in global capitalism (Piazza 2005; Goddard
2011). Second, if we look closer to more recent years, for the period 2010-2017, and
leaving Cyprus aside, France ranks first together with the Basque Country with an
average of 125 DNW. The trough for the Basque Country was in 2015 with only 25
DNW as the 2008 economic crises had forced important industrial restructurings and
layoffs across the territory. Yet, as for today, the recovery of strike activity in the Basque
Country is impressive (125, 124 and 413 DNW for 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively),
4 Note that Spanish stastics incorporate Basque striking numbers, and which
signicantly amount up to a third of the total strikes taking place in Spain.
18
and probably being the highest in Europe together with France (from which there is no
official data available).
ELA’s particularity towards union renewal and its ‘spill-over’ effect
ELA’s and LAB’s ‘strategic convergence’ for the articulation of a ‘Basque trade union
majority’ is a dynamic process that dates to the early 1990s, but which has had no
linear or progressive path. Quite the opposite, it has followed successive ups and
downs, and most importantly, the differences have occurred in how to structure
collective bargaining according to the best correlation of forces, be the work center, the
company or the sector (Kortabarria 2016: 240-243). Intimately related to such debate,
they have also confronted on whether if to develop and strengthen their strike-funds to
augment their capacity to engage into industrial conflict effectively.
ELA’s renewal strategy based on developing an organisational model that aims at
maintaining a well-organised workplace in order to be able to bargain better (Author(s)
XXXX; YYYY), makes industrial conflict and the strike-fund essential elements of their
tactical template. Such strategic turn occurred as a result of ten-year internal
discussions in which the contingent benefits of embracing social dialogue and an
increasingly weak collective bargaining structure had to be dismissed first, so that a
new path could be outlined then, even though the process was neither linear nor fully
coherent from the beginning (Letamendia, 2004; Elorrieta 2011; 2017; Kortabarria,
2016).
According to ELA, striking is a union tactic necessary to crystalise the correlation of
forces and make possible collective agreements and political discussions that in other
conditions would not be made. It requires workers’ willingness to engage into unitary
action that provokes their active participation in decision-making and coordination
procedures, thus, resulting in some form of collective empowerment and (economic as
well as political) solidarity to demand socio-labor improvements over immediate
working conditions within a labour market that is reproduced by the continuous
individuation of interests (see Starosta, 2016: 168-9). It also serves to locate the
parties more clearly, the worker and employer, with their respective positions of power
in wider terms, i.e. in class terms (Dribbusch, 2016: 350; also Hyman, 1973: 52-5;
Franzosi, 1995: 99-101). A unionism that builds the organisational capacities to centre
worker mobilisation and striking within their recurrent repertoire of actions, that
explores the economic, legal and political pros and cons of engaging into industrial
conflict, and which concludes that striking is essential to eliminate job insecurity in
contexts of prevailing insecurity and union disorganisation (ELA, 2000: 56-58), will also
force itself to adapt and renew its functioning in a holistic way (Fairbrother 2015: 571),
so that it can effectively respond to their counterparts, mainly companies, employers
and neoliberal governments that want to block or discredit such strategy.
More concretely, ELA has had to redirect legal, economic and political resources to
counterattack: (i) companies’ recurring tendency to violate strikers’ rights or (ii) to
judicialise industrial conflicts or rendering them illegal; (iii) government’s imposition of
19
mediation bodies to de-escalate workers’ sense of injustice and reduce union’s
initiative; (iv) public and social media’s accusations and ideological censorship; (v) the
critiques of other unions that embraced social dialogue as the best way for their
renewal. In that sense, embracing industrial conflict as a renewal strategy does not
only reside in organising more strikes (see Table 3 below), but also in articulating an
overall ideological discourse that accepts and emphasises that class struggle is
inherent to capitalist development and that workers must organise consciously in order
to advance their interests (ELA 2017:31-46).
Consequently, a union may decide that the strike is part of its core renewal strategy
and proactively build up solidarity tools such as the resistance-fund or the strike-box to
be better position with respect to their opponent. The resistance-fund emerges as an
example of investing union resources to later engage into industrial action (Fuess,
1990), of deploying collective resources for the use of its membership and enhance
rank-and-file militancy (Dribbusch, 2016). It is an instrument and expression of union
power because if, and as the literature on strikes has argued, the outcome of strikes is
conditioned by the capability of inducing economic, political and moral costs to the
opponent, reducing the economic costs of the striking workers whilst still working to
produce a strong sense of solidary may change the balance of forces in favour of labor,
and both unions’ and workers’ bargaining power will be multiplied (Roscigno and
Hodson, 2004; Fowler et al. 2009; for another empirical example showing ESK’s
tactical success see López-Andreu, 2019b).
It becomes now determinant to underline that, historically, both LAB and ESK have
created and improved their strike-funds after ELA’s relative success in achieving good
collective agreements (see Author(s), YYYY), and in preserving their leadership
position as a politically committed trade union against neoliberal capitalism (see Table
1). Inter-union competition and debates over which renewal strategy was best triggered
a ‘spill over’ effect (Akkerman, 2014; Jansen, 2014), or a sort of ‘virtuous spiral’ in
which those unions sympathetic to the ‘counter-power’ strategy have been thrust to
reflect critically on their practices and organise their own strike-boxes and use them
accordingly (Calleja 2016: 249; see LAB-2017; ESK-2019; STEILAS-2019).
The fact that other unions may not have such instrument hinders inter-union
coordinated action as some cannot engage into as many and lasting conflicts
(Thommes and Akkerman 2018), whilst those that have it argue that not having it
significantly reduces the effectiveness to use short-term strikes as an effective
collective bargaining tool. According to an ELA delegate
[A union delegate] cannot pretend an employer to accept their petition to
eliminate [wage-stratification policies] with a one-day strike. I have to try to go
on a longer strike, as long as it is necessary for the employer to accept that he
has no other choice but to eliminate [them]. The issue of the strike-fund is an
essential element for the kind trade unionism we are doing. We have currently
strikes in four residences, and three of them have passed 100 days. You will win
or lose [the conflict], but you cannot pretend workers to be on strike for 100
20
days without a strike-fund. This means that the fact that you have [such tool]
allows you to intervene stronger but, in turn, the fact that it is you who only has
it makes it more difficult… [Because] who will go with you on strike? The most
unbalancing mechanism there is today is the strike-fund. That is why it becomes
a perverse mechanism. I need it to engage into union action but, as I go with
you, you don’t want to join me. There is no solution… or it does, that you have
another one (ELA representative, quoted in Calleja 2016: 248).
ELA representatives are very aware of the fact that strikes need to reduce corporate
profitability, or the threat of undertaking them, so that their demands can be at least be
brought to the negotiation board (Author(s) YYYY); and yet, LAB still accuses ELA for a
‘lack of solidarity’ and willingness to ‘fatten their union’ by recurring systematically to
the organisation of strikes. ELA’s representatives respond that the problem resides on
the rest not having and supporting one strike-fund (Letamendia 2004: 244). More
explicitly, ELA’s ex-general secretary, Txiki Muñoz, recently argued in an interview that
both unions have an important disagreement on how to engage collective bargaining,
because in order to ‘move to more offensive positions’, as in the case of organising a
public education sector strike involving 30.000 workers:
There is hard work to do on the ideological plane, which is what gives you
strength to endure a difficult context in which some [i.e. the employers] believe
that they can end with everything, including class organisations; and then, there
is the organisational aspect too. Of course, you may desire many things but if
you organisationally can't, then it’s very difficult to carry them forward. What if
you want to confront the precariousness that is installed and that is going to
grow, in addition to rhetoric you must also have defensive instruments, and the
strike is an essential element. And when the strike appears ELA and LAB have
important problems that we have not solved yet, which have to do with the
means of each organisation to endure when the one in front of us, either a
public administration or a corporation, renounces, when does not want to
engage in improving working conditions. And in this case we have defended
many times the existence of the strike-fund, [because] it’s an instrument of
sovereignty, [because] if you don’t have a strong strike-fund you are forced to
play the game that interests the employer (Muñoz 2018)
The question of the systematic use or not of the strike-fund and its accompanied legal
and economic counseling, in addition to the debate of articulating a common
resistance-fund in order to pull resources together might be the strongest point of
tension within the power-bloc (Kortabarria 2016: 240-243; 288-291; Bustillo 2007: 23-
25).5 In addition, the participation of LAB within a broader ‘independentist and socialist
movement’ raises fears on their political autonomy and, thus, on the possibility of
articulating a deeper common front in between ELA and LAB. Therefore, ELA remains
sceptic of its strongest ally for still relying on its political branch, EH-Bildu; whilst LAB is
5 Interestingly, as LAB has progressively adapted its renewal strategy to that of ELA’s, CCOO
and UGT have severely criticised the former for ‘giving workplace collective bargaining too
much importance’ (see www.diariovasco.com/economia/arremeten-volcar-negociacion-
20171219001117-ntvo.html).
21
concerned with ELA for prioritising their organisational/corporatist interests than those
of a ‘wider’ working class, the use of the strike-fund being an important source of
mistrust as it becomes an organisational resource that they can only use more
limitedly. Despite these differences that affect the consistency of the ‘counter-power’
bloc and their relation to other unions within and outside the bloc, both ELA and LAB
have shown a strong unity of action in the face of the crisis and austerity policies, jointly
organizing six general strikes in less than four years (Letamendia 2015), compared to
three in Spain for the same period (2009-2013). More recently, the 30th of January
2020, the ‘counter-power bloc’ together with other grass-root social movements
organised a general strike demanding the implementation of progressive Basque Chart
of Social Rights that, and in contrast to prevailing defensive trends in Spain, followed
an attacking logic that aimed at transcending merely resistance patterns in order to
bring Basque precarious workers’ and pensioners demands positively.
22
Table 3. Strike activity per major union in the Basque Country when organizing alone. Source: Basque labour department. Own calculations.
23
Table 3 summarises very rich statistics on strike dynamics in the Basque Country for a
period of nearly twenty years. If we first engage into a cross-section analysis of the
whole period in question (2001-2018), we can see ELA organising 27% of all strikes in
the Basque Country (10% in Spain), and 39% of those are organised alone, 21% are
with another union, and 40% are with other two or more unions. On the other side,
CCOO and UGT organise less strikes and when they do so they tend to do it jointly
with other unions; UGT being the extreme case, as they only strike 5% of the times
alone, and 83% with at least other two or more unions.
If we look at the workers involved, ELA mobilises by itself on average 2.659 workers
per year, LAB and the other ‘counter-power unions’ 1.025, CCOO 159 and UGT 207,
that is thirteen times more than UGT. ELA’s strikes are longer than the rest (17 days),
and at least more than two times longer when organised by CCOO and LAB (7 days
each), and thrice UGT (5). Subsequently, the economic impact of ELA’s combatant
positioning towards collective bargaining, that is the DNW, is 89 times higher than
UGT’s (10.511 DNW to 118), 31 times larger than CCOO’s, and 2.7 times larger than
the summation of the rest of the unions within the ‘counter-power’ bloc. ELA’s DNW in
solitary strikes add up to 26% of its total, whilst LAB’s is only 12%. That CCOO and
UGT do not seek to engage into work stoppages when bargaining concretises in the
fact that it is only 1% of their DNW that derives from their solitary actions.
Longitudinally, these different striking patterns show a reinforcement after the economic
crisis of 2010, and which had its most harmful effects in the Basque economy in 2015,
with the lowest record in employment since the crisis began. If we compare the
statistics of the two decades, and even more those of the last three years (for the
period 2016-2018), we find ELA showing no need of other unions’ approval to strike,
whilst the rest, including LAB, have reduced their striking activity substantially. For
example, whilst for the period 2001-2009, CCOO and UGT organised 45 and 38 strikes
per year respectively, during the last decade they organise 32 and 26, that is 28% and
36% less. ELA and LAB have also seen the number of strikes reduced, but only by 8%
and 15%, thus, corresponding to patterns recorded in the rest of Europe during the last
decade (e.g. Pohl, 2018). Nevertheless, and after the through of 2015, ELA has
renewed its striking impetus and rose its average again to 76 strikes per year,
participating at least in 37% of all the strikes taking place in the region. Interestingly,
ELA has increased the proportion of strikes organised alone, from 25% for the years
2001-2009 to 54% for 2010-2018. Actually, the conflicts around the use of the strike-
fund show up by the increasing capacity of ELA to mobilse the workforce alone, whilst
the rest of the unions face more organizational difficulties. In that sense, we can argue
that ELA is increasing its capacity to generate conflict by itself, thus augmenting the
schism with other unions that do not follow similar objectives. Whilst for the period
2001-2009 ELA was capable of having an economic impact of 7.196 DNW on average
per year, during the last three years, it has reached an average of 18.570 DNW, which
amounts to 45% of its total annual DNW. For the same years, LAB has seen reduced
the DNW by 37% (2.722 to 4.305), CCOO 52% (182 to 382), and UGT has show an
increase of 73%, but mainly because of scattered conflicts that level up already low
averages. For the common critique that attributes ELA of a corporatist logic for seeking
only to augment its membership through signing company agreements and engaging
24
into single-workplace struggles, the statistics show that ELA is increasingly more
capable of mobilising many more companies and more workers by themselves than the
rest of the unions.
Conclusions
This article has shown how union strategies are a crucial aspect in the study and
uneven development of strikes. Four main conclusions shall be derived. First, and
beyond inter-territorial comparisons, the four main Basque major unions show
substantially differentiated forms of facing industrial conflict. Two union models produce
two substantially statistical trends: the ‘counter-power’ unions have embraced striking
as a necessary bargaining-coin during the last two decades, whilst ‘social dialogue’
unions have been much less eager to bargain through overt forms of conflict. In turn,
with respect to the literature on strikes, the general conclusion that may be derived
from the article is methodological: moving beyond methodologies that predominantly
study ‘structural factors’ (Bordogna and Cella 2002; Scheuer 2006; Bordogna 2010;
Traxler and Brandl 2010; Godard 2011) permit us to bring political aspects to the
forefront, i.e. that the formation of trade union strategies is a necessary ‘conscious
moment’ in the unfolding of collective bargaining processes which, consequently, may
have a significant impact on strike patterns. Moreover, the study also points to the
importance of generating union-based statistics and analysing them critically. Problems
to gather statistically meaningful territorial union-comparative data are multiple
(Franzosi 1995; Dribbusch and Vandaele 2016), but researchers should not give up to
such task and aim at generating datasets that would permit us exerting similar studies.
Second, the study shows Basque unionism to be a rare case within comparative
industrial relations models, ‘comfortably’ ranking first in the ‘European striking league’
as a result of particular strategies towards union renewal. Basque unions (ELA and
LAB) have progressively embraced a ‘counter-power’ strategy that puts industrial
conflict into the core of their renewal strategies, and which has had serious effects on
strike patterns in the entire territory during the last two decades. A ‘deep organising’
strategy does not simply seek to mobilise workers in order to ‘create an illusion of
strength’, but rather as a step in the more cohesive and dynamic formation of a union
model (McAlevey 2016: 206-7) in a context of fiscal austerity, labour market
deregulation and industrial restructuring. In that sense, it goes beyond immediate
interests and seeks to renew the union through actively preparing the workforce for of
engaging into industrial action (Harcourt et al. 2013; Hennebert and Faulkner 2017;
Hodder et al. 2017). Or in other words, understanding strikes as a necessary moment
in the empowerment of the working class poses the strategic question of how to
transform an organization in order to effectively do so. This more syndicalist way of
engaging with collective bargaining is expressed in, among other things, significantly
higher membership rates, signing good collective agreements, or in their capacity to
‘shield’ collective agreements from the last labour reforms (Author(s) XXXX; YYYY). In
the meantime, and not forgetting the broader picture, Basque Country has hosted a
larger number of general strikes than Spain during the crisis, whilst social dialogue has
been criticised fiercely for not providing the necessary gains to the labour force and,
25
subsequently, grass-root social movements are becoming the natural allies of Basque
‘counter-power’ unions.
Third, the strike-fund appears as a crucial organisational power resource that pulls
union affiliates’ economic purchasing power together in order to support those militant
fellows more in need (Fuess 1990; Roscigno and Hodson, 2004; Fowler et al. 2009).
Probematically, this has not been analysed by union renewal literatures, and if anything
it has appeared as an explanatory factor in microeconomic analyses that measure the
monetary power of employers and trade unions when bargaining. In the Basque
Country there is an increasing number of experiences showing its effectiveness, and
this appears in the form of greater and longer strikers organised by ELA but not only, as
there has been a ‘spill over’ effect in which other radical unions have progressively
adopted similar organisational strategies. Historically, for the ‘counter-power’ bloc
unions to deploy organisational resources for organising and mobilising the workplace
effectively they necessarily had to invest in other complementary resources (e.g. by
strengthening their economic or legal branches) and de-invest in others (e.g. by
reducing their participation on social dialogue boards that could de-legitimate their
radical discourse and appealing to the rank-and-file). The latter is not only an ‘empirical
question’, but also practical and political in nature: on how we can conceive working
class power resources, understand their mutual inter-dependence, and how we may
determine certain renewal strategies to be preferable than others. This strategic
question requires further qualitative and quantitative research, and practical reflection,
but which falls outside the scope of this article, again, on the importance of studying
power resources not only analytically (Levesque and Murray 2010), in their apparent
difference, but also within a more synthetic framework that shall explain them ‘in their
transition’ (Fairbrother 2015) and historical unity (Ollman 2003; for a recent Gramscian
intake on working and union power resources see Roca and Las Heras, 2020;
Author(s) ZZZZ). More specifically, concrete and complex case studies may help us to
better grasp the use and effectiveness of the strike-fund, the limitations and problems
of internal democracy it inherently brings when giving more power to union
bureaucracy in determining what conflicts are worthwhile of confederal support and
which ones not, or when the strike-fund is not homogeneously distributed and leaves
member or non-member workers aside. More general research questions may help us
to relate striking patterns with broader macroeconomic trends, specificities related to
particular economic sectors (industrial vs services, precarious vs non-precarious,
migrant and feminised sectors and so on), exploring the relation between striking and
yielding positive outcomes, understanding members’ arguments to affiliate or not to a
specific union if it follows a certain approach to strikes, or even in studying other
territories like Galisia in Spain, in which different and still unexplored forms of ‘counter-
power’ unionism exist.
Finally, what appears to be the most immediate question around union renewal
strategies in the Basque Country and Spain is that: if the differentiated use of the
strike-fund does not preclude inter-union struggles but may reinforce them, may a ‘spill
over’ combatant effect take place and push the rest of the unions to copy or simulate
ELA’s ‘counter-power’ model? Will it produce stronger ties within the two power blocs,
26
especially within the ‘counter-power’ bloc, possibly fostering the creation of a common
pool of strike-funds? In the absence of important strategic changes, path-dependencies
are likely to increase the existing chasm in between these two different forms of
understanding unionism in the Basque Country.
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