The historic UGT leader recalls his time at the Sestao shipyard, where he entered as an apprentice at just 15 years old in 1942 and where he began his union activity
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 reviewed his 30 years working in the Biscayan shipyard The Navy. The historic union leader was 90 years old at the time and was still recovering from a last surgical intervention that kept him in hospital for three months.
I am deeply sorry for the situation at La Naval. It was more than 30 years of my life there and that marks me in an extraordinary way. At the shipyard I saw people’s capacity for sacrifice and it gave me a great sense of class.
I entered La Naval in 1942, shortly after returning from France, where I was what was called 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 for four years with a French family.
I was in the shipyard until 1973, when I was fired for missing more than three days from work because they had arrested me again. The thing is that since I was arrested for the first time in 1951 for distributing UGT propaganda, until 1973 they had arrested me half a dozen more times –1960, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1970 and 1971–. Even in 1967, after participating actively in the ‘gang strike’, they exiled me for three months to Las Hurdes (Cáceres), but when I returned to La Naval nothing happened. They never fired me until 1973. I think that then the order did not come from the management in Vizcaya, which was much more permissive, but rather came from Madrid.
In the trial for the dismissal, Felipe González defended me and we won in the first instance, but then we lost it in Madrid and they fired me for good.
When I entered there were about 4,000 or 5,000 workers. I was then 15 years old. We entered as apprentices and there they trained us. I remember that sometimes some Jesuits also came to give us courses in Christianity. The apprenticeship period was four years and then you had to pass a series of exams; If you passed, you were already a third-class officer and depending on the grade you chose one job or another. I must not have gotten a very good grade because I stayed as an adjuster; a good trade, but it was not an outstanding thing.
Even if it is only out of gratitude for what has been, we must move it forward
They put me in the machine shop, which was also a center of labor and social unrest within the company. The Navy was already at that time the one that largely catalyzed the conflicts in Vizcaya. There was a protest because people who had been imprisoned after the war worked there and then returned to the shipyard because they were good professionals. There my political and ideological criteria were reaffirmed, which I already brought from home – 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 management of the company already knew who the protesters were. Tomás Tueros, who was general secretary of CC OO-Euskadi and a 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 would wait for me there to search my ticket office in search of propaganda and arrest me. Other times there were colleagues who when they found out that they were coming for me would notify me, I would escape, I would hide for a while, sometimes in San Sebastián, and when I returned to work nothing happened. I told myself ‘they’ll throw me out of this one because they’ll be fed up with me’, but no. I, too, have sometimes wondered how we didn’t get fired before.
nor drive a nail
Over time I became a first-class adjuster, although at home they teased me and told me how could I be an adjuster if I didn’t even know how to drive a nail. But it is that I no longer felt the job because I was in other things, in union issues.
Only once did the company impose a ban on me: when I requested a change in category, because although I was an adjuster, I had been doing administrative functions for a long time, they accepted the claim and made me a first-rate employee in the office, but they demanded that I never go down to the workshop. I think they thought that if they removed me from the workshop the thing would calm down, but I was only one of the many who protested. And since I couldn’t go downstairs, it was the people from the workshop who went up for the union’s propaganda to a tiny file that was in my office. We called that archive ‘the people’s house’.
There were seasons when you got to work 12-hour shifts, day and night. I remember a time when we made many fishing boats for Cuba, which were small but there was an urgent need 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 the worst time were those who worked in the stands riveting. In machinery, where the parts were made and the engines were assembled, it was much more bearable. In any case, although there were accidents and some fatalities, the occupational accident rate was not too high. In this sense, in labor prevention, I believe that La Naval was also a pioneer company.
Now, I believe that even if it were only out of gratitude for what La Naval, like other large companies, has meant for the economic and social development of Biscay and the Basque Country, everyone, the Basque Government and political parties, would be obliged to move it forward. And also for what it is and for what it can once again become.
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