By Sarah Morris
GIJON, Spain Sept 27 (Reuters) - To get an idea of how things have changed for Spanish unions in the past decade or so, take a look at the waterfront area in Gijon on the northern Spanish coast. Along the Playa Poniente, shiny new blocks of flats sport curved lines reminiscent of a cruise liner's hull, an architectural nod to the area's shipbuilding past.
The apartment blocks -- built just as Spain's decade-long housing boom burst -- sell for upwards of 350,000 euros ($471,000) and are popular with sunseekers. For two men who once constructed real ships here, though, the buildings symbolise a tradition lost.
"Do you see those luxury flats?" asks Candido Gonzalez Carnero, 58, pointing along the skyline. "That was a shipyard. Look, that's an aquarium. Do you know what was there? A shipyard."
Gonzalez and his friend Juan Manuel Martinez Morala are both former union leaders and unabashed old-style radicals. They believe Gijon's politicians and company bosses ran down the shipyards to free up the land for residential development, killing an industry that once employed up to 6,000 people in the region.
Surprisingly, the two men are even harsher on some of the unionists they once stood alongside, accusing them of being too willing to sign redundancy plans and make peace with bosses. "They have sold out," says Morala, a skinny man with a neatly clipped grey beard, wearing light canvas trousers and a small gillet over a short-sleeved shirt.
"Today among the working class in Spain, the contempt for unions is almost unanimous," says Morala. "I'd say they speak almost worse of unions than they do of bosses."
One of the most bitter disputes in Gijon began in 2000 when the shipbuilder Naval Gijon moved to get rid of 200 workers. Gonzalez says the workers were young and on temporary contracts, on the verge of gaining extra contractual rights.
The shipbuilders at the company walked off the job, and the strikes and battles in the streets of Gijon with police that followed were terrifying. One unionist lost an eye.
"No one wants to be in the street fighting and exposing yourself to the police taking your eye out," says Gonzalez. "It's not pleasant for anyone, you do it when you get to a desperate situation."
The fight to defend the younger workers caught the attention of Spanish film director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, who visited Asturias to film the conflict. Footage of the workers clashing with police opens his film, 2002's "Mondays in the Sun", which looks at the effects of unemployment on a group of men.
The bulky bearded protagonist Santa, played by Javier Bardem, is too volatile and too big physically to be very reminiscent of either Candido or Morala. But Santa and his friends' debates are the words of the Asturias' unionists. Leon filmed all eight hours of a union assembly as the conflict reached its tensest moment.
Candido and Morala were later sent to prison after being found guilty of breaking part of a surveillance camera during a protest -- the first unionist jailed for work-related conflicts since the country became a democracy. The men deny they broke the camera, though they say they know who did but will not give their names. The guilty verdict came despite photographers at the scene giving evidence in court that Candido and Morala were innocent.
After a public outcry in Asturias, a judge reduced the three-year prison sentence and the men returned home after about two weeks.
Labour strikes, the two men say, is sometimes the only way to deal with the state. Both took part in repeated "mobilisation" during their 30 years of work: marches, strikes, tyre-burning, factory lock-ins, and takeovers of public buildings including the regional government building and the French consul.
Sometimes things turned violent. The police fired rubber bullets and teargas. The unionists fired at them using homemade catapults made from the materials of their daily jobs.
"If you give up mobilisation as a means of pressure, as a defence of workers, well the results are there for all to see -- in the situation in this country, in how Europe is," says Gonzalez.
(Edited by Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)