Workers' Commissions

CCOO

Full name	Workers' Commissions
Native name	Comisiones Obreras
Founded	1976
Members	1,200,000
Country	Spain
Affiliation	ITUC, ETUC
Key people	Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, general secretary
Office location	Madrid, Spain
Website	www.ccoo.es

CC.OO. sticker

The Workers' Commissions (Spanish: Comisiones Obreras, CCOO) since the 1970s has become the largest trade union in Spain. It has more than one million members and is the most successful union in labor elections, competing with the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) (historically affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party [PSOE]), with the syndicalist Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) usually a distant third.

The CCOO were organized in the 1960s by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and workers' Roman Catholic groups to fight against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and for labor rights (in opposition to the non-representative "vertical unions" in the Spanish Trade Union Organisation). The various organizations formed a single entity after a 1976 Congress in Barcelona.

Along with other unions like the Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) and the UGT, it called a general strike in 1976, and carried out protests against the conditions in the country. Marcelino Camacho, a major figure of Spanish trade unionism and a PCE member, was CCOO's General Secretary from its foundation to 1985 - he was elected to the Congress of Deputies in the 1977 election.

General Secretary

Between 1985 and 1997, the union's General Secretary was Antonio Gutiérrez; he was followed by José María Fidalgo(1997–2009), often criticized by the left wing of the union. The CCOO and the UGT, summoned three general strikes (1988, 1992 and 1994) against the economic policy of the Felipe González government, and one on June 20, 2002, against the government of José María Aznar and its plan to change the unemployment insurance system.

The current General Secretary is Ignacio Fernandez Toxo. On September 29, 2010, the CCOO called a general strike to protest the José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero government's plans to raise the retirement age and cut spending.^[1]

References

1. ^ "Spain Has First General Strike in Decade as Europe Marches". Bloomberg. 2010. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-28/spain-girds-for-first-general-strike-in-8-years-to-protest-zapatero-cuts.html. Retrieved 26 October 2010. 

External links

• (Spanish)CCOO official site.
• (Spanish)CCCO's Critical Sector forum

Organized labour portal