Trade unions and communism in Spain: The role of the CCOO in the political projects of the left

The crisis of Spanish communism in the 1980s was such that the party was unable to articulate an effective alternative to the dominant Socialist Party. The way in which trade unionism evolved in the period from the late 1950s meant that the unions developed an identity and a political orientation that went beyond the traditional collective bargaining functions usually attributed to such organizations. These developments have been ignored by many observers who have preferred to downplay the role of the unions, especially the Communist‐oriented CCOO, in partly filling the vacuum on the Left at that time. This has had repercussions on the relations between party and trade union, so often defined in terms of the simplistic notion of a ‘transmission belt’.