The historic unionist leader of the UGT, Nicolás Redondo Urbieta, died yesterday at the age of 95. Also a member and leader of the PSOE, he was one of the key figures in trade unionism during the 80s and 90s in Spain, participating in the Pactes de la Moncloa and organizing several of the main general strikes at the end of the century. Redondo, who shared the card of the UGT and the PSOE, put his militancy in the central group ahead of him – he went so far as to resign from leading the party during the Transition – and was the first general secretary to draw a line between the two organizations, in the name of union autonomy.
In the same way that the current general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, has sat down with the socialist Pedro Sánchez to try to establish an income pact that shares the costs of the greatest inflation in decades, Nicolás Redondo did the same with Adolfo Suárez and managed to promote what was dubbed the Pactes de la Moncloa. Agreements in which the unions agreed to demand lower wages and lower the high labor conflict at that time, in the name of greater economic stability.
Metallurgist from Baracaldo (Biscay) and born in 1927, Nicolás Redondo joined the UGT in 1945 – six years after the end of the Civil War – and assumed the general secretaryship on April 18, 1976. The basque had to pilot the historic Spanish union – CCOO was founded in the Transition and at the time it barely had a few years of history – between the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, which shot up the IPC by above double digits and they strained the negotiation tables with employers to high levels of worker mobilizations.
While a year ago the Government managed to agree with employers and unions on a new labor reform whose main task is to reduce the high and chronic levels of temporary employment among workers, this was one of the causes that led Redondo to set up to his party colleague Felipe González is one of the biggest general strikes in the history of Spain. Thus, on December 14, 1988, the UGT together with CCOO called a strike against the new temporary contracts designed by the socialists and which were particularly focused on young people. On April 10, 1994, he gave way to Cándido Méndez as general secretary of the UGT and retired from all political activity.