The historic UGT leader recalls his time at the Sestao shipyard, where he was apprenticed in 1942 at the age of 15 and where he began his union activities
Due to its journalistic value, we publish a conversation that Nicolás Redondo Urbieta (Barakaldo, June 16, 1927) had in September 2017 with the journalist from ‘El Correo’ Jesús L. Ortega, in which he reflected on his 30 years of working in the Biscay shipyard De Marine . The historic union leader was 90 years old at the time and was still recovering from a final surgical procedure that kept him in hospital for three months.
I am deeply sorry for the situation in La Naval. It was more than 30 years of my life there and that marks me in an extraordinary way. On the yard I saw people’s capacity for sacrifice and that gave me a great sense of class.
I entered La Naval in 1942, shortly after returning from France, where I was a “war child.” And it is that after the bombing of Guernica, when I was only 10 years old, they put me on a ship in Santurce to Bordeaux and then I lived with a French family for four years.
I was at the shipyard until 1973 when I was fired for being absent from work for more than three days because they arrested me again. The point is that since I was first arrested in 1951 for spreading UGT propaganda, they had arrested me half a dozen more times until 1973 – in 1960, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1970 and 1971 -. Even in 1967, after taking an active part in the ‘gang strike’, I was exiled to Las Hurdes (Cáceres) for three months, but when I returned to La Naval nothing happened. They didn’t fire me until 1973. I think the order then did not come from the management in Vizcaya, which was much more tolerant, but rather from Madrid.
In the sack trial, Felipe González defended me and we won at first, but then we lost in Madrid and they sacked me for good.
When I entered, there were about 4,000 or 5,000 workers. I was then 15 years old. We came in as apprentices and they trained us there. I remember that sometimes some Jesuits also came to give us courses in Christianity. Apprenticeship was four years and then you had to take a series of exams; If you passed, you were already a third-rate officer and depending on the rank you chose one or the other job. I must not have gotten a very good grade, because I stayed as an adjuster; a good trade, but it wasn’t anything special.
They put me in the machine shop, which was also a center of labor and social unrest within the company. The navy was already the one that largely catalyzed the conflicts in Vizcaya. There was protest because people who had been imprisoned after the war worked there and then returned to the shipyard because they were good craftsmen. There my political and ideological criteria, which I had already brought with me from home, were reaffirmed – my father had been sentenced to death by Francoism, although his sentence was later commuted – and at the age of 18 I joined the UGT and the PSOE in hiding.
The company’s management already knew who the demonstrators were. Tomás Tueros, general secretary of CC OO-Euskadi and member of the Communist Party, also worked there, but they did not retaliate against us. Even when they called me to the offices, the police were waiting for me there to search my counter for propaganda and arrest me. Other times there were colleagues who, when they found out they were coming for me, informed me, I fled, I hid for a while, sometimes in San Sebastián, and when I went back to work, nothing happened. I told myself ‘they will throw me out of here because they will get tired of me’ but no. I too have sometimes wondered how we weren’t fired sooner.
In time I became a first-class expert, although they teased me at home and told me how to be an expert if I didn’t even know how to drive a nail. But it’s that I didn’t feel the job anymore because I was busy with other things, with union issues.
Only once has the company suspended me: when I requested a change of category, because although I was a regulator, but had held administrative positions for a long time, they accepted the claim and made me a first-class employee in the office, but they demanded that I never go to the workshop. I think they thought if they took me out of the workshop it would calm down, but I was just one of many who protested. And since I couldn’t go downstairs, it was the people from the workshop who went upstairs for the trade union propaganda to a small file that was in my office. We called that archive ‘the house of the people’.
There were seasons when you had to work 12-hour shifts day and night. I remember a time when we made a lot of fishing boats for Cuba, which were small but urgently needed to finish them, and when we worked at night, we warmed ourselves by approaching some large light bulbs that were there for lighting. Those who had it worst were those who cooperated in the stands. In machines, where the parts were made and the engines assembled, it was much more bearable. Anyway, although there were accidents and some deaths, the number of occupational accidents was not too high. In this sense, I believe that La Naval was also a pioneer company in the field of labor prevention.
Now I believe that, even if only out of gratitude for what La Naval, like other major companies, has done for the economic and social development of Biscay and the Basque Country, everyone, the Basque government and political parties, would be obliged to pushing it forward. And also for what it is and for what it can become again.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
