Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- 5 The Vertical Syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy
- 6 The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez
- 7 Wage contracts, labour conflicts and political protests: the syndical practices of the labour movement
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- 5 The Vertical Syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy
- 6 The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez
- 7 Wage contracts, labour conflicts and political protests: the syndical practices of the labour movement
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The essence of the phenomenon is in its roots, that is in the countless commissions in the workplace and the syndicates which struggle to discover, define and demand their rights, even though the men who make up the commissions may not be fully aware of what they are doing.
Fernando Soto, A Ras de TierraEveryone agrees that the workers' commissions were an entirely new form of organization, which had no exact precedent in the history of the working-class movement in Europe. But the consensus goes no further than this, and there is little agreement about what the workers' commissions were, or about when or how they began. These basic historical questions remain unsettled partly because there has been a failure to recognize what one rare publication called the ‘diverse modes of their emergence’ (Frères:1969) in different regions of the country, and a corresponding failure to search for what these different styles had in common. This story will take up this search progressively in the different contexts of the commissions' syndical practices of collective bargaining and strikes (Chapter 7), and of their relations with the Communist Party (Chapter 11), with the Vertical Syndicate (Chapter 12), and with their own members and between themselves in this chapter.
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- Information
- Making Democracy in SpainGrass-Roots Struggle in the South, 1955–1975, pp. 88 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989