Striking to Renew: Basque Unions’ Organizing Strategies and Use of the Strike‐Fund
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Jon Las Heras,Lluis Rodríguez |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12582 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12582
59:3 September 2021 0007–1080 pp. 669–700
Striking to Renew: Basque Unions’
Organizing Strategies and Use of the
Strike-Fund
Jon Las Heras and Lluis Rodríguez
Abstract
‘There is no union renewalwithout 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 (Euskal Langileen
Alkartasuna) and LAB (Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak) have formed a
‘counterpower’ bloc, in opposition to CCOO (Comisiones Obreras) and UGT
(Union General de Trabajadores) that are more prone to engage into social
dialogue. The formers’ renewal strategy based on organizing workers ‘deeply’
— especially with ELA’s recurrent use of a strike-fund that fosters membership
participation and afliation 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 polarizes union
alliances substantially. The article brings out the question of how unions could
possibly locate industrial conict within their renewal strategies and transform
their organizations accordingly. Methodologically, the article contributes to the
literature on strikes byunderlining 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.
1. 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
Jon Las Heras and Lluis Rodríguezare at the University of the Basque Country.
Correspondence
Jon Las Heras,Elkano Kalea 21, Bilbao 48008, Bizkaia, Spain.
Email: jon.lasheras@ehu.eus
© 2020 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
670 British Journal of Industrial Relations
records very high industrial conict 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 evolutionshows a signicant 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
conict to show that capitalism is inherently conictive and disruption
prone (Hebdon 2005; Godard 2011, 2014) However, this methodological
turn may undermine the possibility of engaging with existing union renewal
strategies critically, and understand the importance of industrial conict in
the empowerment of the working class. Commodity exchange, wage labour
and the prot motive, fundamental relations of our society are in themselves
founded upon conict and pre-suppose 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: 16–18,
2016: 284–85) To put the story short, after 10 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
20 years, crackedand was eventually dismissed. The rise of thesecond Basque
union (LAB — Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak) allowed forthe two Basque
sovereigntist unions to forma new alliance that stood in opposition to the two
main Spanish unions, which weremore inclined to engage into social dialogue
and higher-level forms of collective bargaining as paths to union renewal
(e.g. Hamann 2012; Hamann and Martinez-Lucio 2003; Pérez-de-Guzmán
et al. 2016; Rigby and García-Calavia 2017) 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
organizational resourcessuch as the strike-fund; (ii) developing law,economic
and gender consulting ofces to support and defend both workers and
the union from possible counterattacks; (iii) attaining political autonomy
through gaining greaternancial autonomy and depending less on the support
from public subsidies; (iv) dismissing corporatist pacts and social dialogue
agreements fornot paying-off enoughand (v) forging new alliances with other
radical unions and grass-roots social movements. Their historical synthesis
has paved the way for a form of ‘counterpower’ unionism that aims at
© 2020 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
Striking to Renew 671
reorganizing the rank-and-le 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 develop supplementary power resources. The different strategic
positioning of the two union blocs and their accumulation of confederal
resources and struggle experiences has produced an uneven landscape of
industrial conict in which some unions record substantially higher strikes
than others, while 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 2012; Hamman and Martinez-Lucio
2003; 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) Moreover, and in contrast to tactical victories
of radical unions and spontaneous struggles of precarious, feminized and
migrant workers (Alberti and Però 2018; Kirkpatrick 2014), our study shows
the importance of materializing wider organizational transformations that
accompany an overarching renewal strategy so that it is possible to effectively
challenge: (i) corporate domination in collective bargaining in order to
yield better outcomes more systematically; and (ii) the hegemonic neoliberal
discourse and policies of business associations and governments tout court,
so that alternative social models and forms of economic democracy are
brought to the forefront of the political debate. In this sense, adopting a
particular renewal strategy produces a set of contradictions and challenges
that require unions to transformtheir internal/external functioning in order to
accommodate their wider reective praxis to the newly created environment,
that is,unions appear always to be ‘in transition’ (Fairbrother2015; Las Heras
2019a; Roca and Las Heras 2020): the strategic problem being whether 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 idiosyncraticterritorial, institutional, economic
or other structural factors to explain chronologicaland geographic differences
(e.g. Bordogna 2010; Bordogna and Cella 2002; Godard 2011; Scheuer 2006;
Traxler and Brandl 2010), rather than resulting from historically specic
strategies towards union renewal.The article contributes thus both to the
literature studyingthe evolution of strikepatterns and to the debates on union
renewal by showing that organizing 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.
© 2020 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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