Spain. Valladolid Metalworkers’ Collective Bargaining Agreement: Metalworkers will only break free from the vicious cycle they find themselves in by freeing themselves from the shackles of political and union collaborationism

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Valladolid Metalworkers’ Collective Bargaining Agreement: Metalworkers will only break free from the vicious cycle they find themselves in by freeing themselves from the shackles of political and union collaborationism

The collective bargaining agreement for the steel industry in Valladolid (which covers more than 5,000 workers) is currently under negotiation to renew the terms for the coming years. The negotiating committee was formed in mid-April 2026, and since then, several meetings have taken place without any progress. One of the province’s most important industrial sectors remains at an impasse due to the employers’ unwillingness to negotiate; they intend to use these negotiations to challenge the rights won through decades of union struggle.

Once again, the employers’ position is the same as always: to reduce or eliminate social rights; to limit economic protection in the event of temporary disability; to maintain excessive working hours; and to keep wages in check even as corporate profits continue to rise.

Negotiations have also taken place recently regarding the collective bargaining agreements for two of Valladolid’s largest automotive manufacturers, the Renault and Iveco plants. Given their size, these two companies have their own collective bargaining agreements, and for each, numerous meetings took place between the parties (the unions represented on the works council and management representatives); after some tentative mobilizations, these negotiations resulted only in an agreement offering few improvements and failing entirely to address the workers’ interests and demands. Faced with this situation, the response from both the major unions and the various political parties that define themselves as “workers’ parties” consists solely of accepting defeat or making absurd statements—apparently radical but ultimately powerless.

The unions are demanding a 5% annual increase for the three-year period from 2026 to 2028. Management, on the other hand, is offering 2.5% for 2026 and 1.5% for 2027 and 2028. For the employee representatives, this isn’t an offer—it’s a provocation.

Unions such as CCOO are proposing 5% wage increases and reductions in working hours, among other improvements. While this is a positive development, it is not accompanied by any form of pressure or mobilization. Among their main proposals are reducing the annual workweek to 1,728 hours, as well as a more rational distribution of working hours from Monday through Friday, including the recognition of lunch breaks as actual working time and the implementation of measures guaranteeing the right to digital disconnection. On the issue of wages, they propose annual increases of 5% for the duration of the agreement, as well as a guarantee clause allowing for adjustments based on the actual Consumer Price Index (CPI), with the aim of maintaining purchasing power. In addition to other less significant demands, CCOO has expressed its “willingness to negotiate responsibly,” which, as we already know, means they will not budge an inch.

For its part, the CGT Metal Valladolid (excluded from the negotiating table), which has also limited itself to statements and complaints in the media, is calling for firm, determined negotiations and denounces the lack of transparency in the negotiation process, which has already resulted in more than eight meetings without any progress. After several meetings, the workers know only that the negotiations have reached an impasse and that the unions at the table are announcing possible protests. However, the experience of past negotiations calls for caution. All too often, these protests have ended up serving as a tool to rubber-stamp inadequate agreements, rather than forcing management to back down from its demands. The reality is that, in recent years, many collective bargaining agreements signed by the CCOO and the UGT have provided for wage increases that have failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living, resulting in a real loss of purchasing power for thousands of workers. Similarly, during various rounds of negotiations, measures allowing for employer flexibility and changes to working conditions have been accepted—measures that can hardly be described as improvements for workers.

In recent years, we have seen our living and working conditions deteriorate year after year. And this is happening under a “left-wing” government, with the complicity of the mainstream labor unions.

In El Proletario No. 32 (2024), following the mobilizations by Acerinox workers, we analyzed the various labor disputes in Spain’s metalworking sector as follows:

“For several years now, tensions between workers and management in the metalworking sector have been constant. In 2019, the signing of the sector-wide collective bargaining agreement in Biscay led to violent protests, clashes between police and workers, and so on. Even back then, it was clear that the economic crisis—concentrated primarily in the steel and metalworking sectors and resulting in overproduction across all branches of the industry—would lead to an intensification of the demands that employers would impose on workers in the sector. The situation created by the pandemic in 2020 and throughout nearly all of 2021 delayed the inevitable eruption of these latent tensions, but ultimately, at the end of 2021, clashes between workers in Cádiz’s auxiliary industries and local employers once again brought to light, for all to see, the reality of an unresolved crisis. Shortly before that, the long strike at Tubacex had demonstrated both the strength of a working class refusing to be trampled upon and the determination of the bosses not to give an inch, aware that every battle fought was vital both for the affected business owners and for a large part of the bourgeoisie. Following these two strikes—the second of which was successful, while the first was harshly suppressed by the police and the mainstream unions—a wave of strikes swept through various provinces (Pontevedra, Cantabria, Catalonia…) just as each of the provincial collective bargaining agreements was due to be negotiated. On all these occasions, the employers’ stance was clear and unambiguous: wage increases, certainly, but below the rate of inflation—in other words, a decline in real wages. As always, the major unions rushed to the employers’ aid, attempting to stifle the struggles where they were strongest (Vigo, Cantabria, etc.), and the national government, led by the minister from the PCE (Spanish Communist Party), worked tirelessly to pressure workers into accepting the employers’ demands. Overall, it can be said that these five years of struggles in the metalworking sector have resulted in an immediate defeat for the workers. With the exception of Tubacex, the employers’ will prevailed in the other conflicts, and despite the intensity of the struggles that sought to oppose them, the working class was unable to mount an effective response. Above all, it failed to transcend the provincial boundaries that limited the struggle and to propose a class-based response. But this victory for the employers does not mean, however, that the problem is solved for them. From an economic standpoint, the situation in the metalworking sector is extremely precarious. Overproduction—both of raw materials upstream in the production chain and of their derivatives across all branches of the sector—is far from being resolved, and much of the trade war currently pitting the United States against China is set against the backdrop of overcapacity in a sector that is key to both the national and international economies, which each of these countries seeks to control as much as possible.”

The resurgence of the class struggle has not materialized. But in recent years we have indeed witnessed sectoral, partial struggles led by groups or contingents of workers who stood up to management as best they could: we saw this during the metalworkers’ strike in Cádiz and at Acerinox… but we’ve also observed it here, much closer to home, in the struggle of the workers at Frenos y Conjuntos and, above all, in that of the workers at Saeta Die Casting—two companies that also belong to the metalworking sector in Valladolid.

“The proletariat has had to—and still must—learn and relearn how to fight for its immediate interests, for it has lost the lived experience, the capacity, and the memory of how to fight against the bosses and their state; and above all, it has lost the memory that every struggle comes to an end, but that the organization of the struggle must remain standing. The proletariat’s trust in organizations considered to be workers’ organizations—such as the official French trade unions—and the delegation of power to parties that claim to be workers’ parties but are in reality ultra-bourgeois —such as the opportunist parties falsely calling themselves socialist and communist—of the political vision and political effort aimed at achieving results beneficial to its own struggle and its own cause within this society, has meant for the proletariat of industrialized countries, and even more so for that of developing countries, a de facto renunciation, a profound renunciation of the class struggle in favor of interclass collaboration. ” (Excerpt from our pamphlet “Sobre la crisis prolongada de la clase proletaria y la posibilidad de salir de ella”).

Only by breaking free from the grip of union collaborationism will workers—those in the metalworking industry as well as others—be able to escape this vicious cycle:

• Against any subordination of workers’ immediate interests to the interests and demands of the market.

• Against any form of cross-class collaboration between workers and bosses, between the exploited and the exploiters.

• For the defense of the proletariat’s living conditions, working conditions, and struggle, free from all bureaucracy and corporatism.

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