Unitary unionism in the transition: a general approach from Navarre

Abstract

Confederación de Sindicatos Unitarios de Trabajadores (CSUT, Confederation of Unitary Workers’ Unions) and Sindicato Unitario (SU, Unitary Union) were two unions promoted by the largest Maoists parties in the Spain of 1970s: Partido del Trabajo de España (PTE, Labor Party of Spain) and the Organizacion Revolucionaria de Trabajadores (ORT, Workers’ Revolutionary Organisation), respectively. Both trade unions, if they had been presented together, would have been the third trade union force in Spain during the Transition to democracy. The following text presents two parts: In the first, a general approach to unitary unionism is set out, in order to understand its emergence, development, difficulties and disappearance. Through this text we will try to understand the unitary and assembly-based proposal of CSUT and SU in its context, considering the dynamics of the labor movement in the previous years, the change of cycle of the struggle of the revolutionary left, the transformations that were taking place in labor relations and the labor movement in the late 1970s. In the second part, however, we will focus on a specific case, that of Navarre, the region where these unions obtained the best results.