The governance of Spanish ports has found in the Canary Islands archipelago its last bastion of corporatism. The recent ruling of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has ratified the exclusion of alternative union currents from the board of directors of the Port Authority of Las Palmas. By dismissing the appeal of Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), the court not only supports an administrative decree; it validates the power structure of the so-called stevedore right, a stronghold of influence that thrives on the legacy left by the Minister of Labor, Solís, during Franco’s time and has managed to confuse the general interests of the port with the privileges of an ultra-concentrated labor sector. Paradoxically, the stevedore right is a member of the Confederation Canaria de Empresarios (CCE) through a company dedicated to various logistical matters. The core of the ruling lies in a restrictive interpretation of a concept: ‘port scope’. While CCOO logically demanded a calculation of representativeness that integrated the entire commercial and logistical ecosystem that sustains the docks, the court has greenlighted the criterion of the Government of the Canary Islands to compute only ‘core’ port service companies. This technical decision has an immediate political consequence: it hands over the keys to institutional representation to the Coordinadora Estatal de Trabajadores del Mar (CETM), fortifying its hegemony against any attempt at union diversity. This ruling enshrines what is known in the sector hallways as the stevedore bunker. By limiting the census to towing, mooring, and stevedoring operations, the system expels thousands of workers from commercial and logistical companies from decision-making who are, ironically, the ones sustaining the business volume of the Port of Las Palmas. The result is a governing body where the stevedore right operates with a flight autonomy that ignores the evolution of modern ports towards open service platforms. For the TSJC, this anomaly is not arbitrary, but a ‘technical discretion’ that the justice system prefers not to interfere with. The severity of the ruling against CCOO also manifests itself in the economic realm, with the imposition of costs, sending a deterrent message to any actor who dares to challenge the established order. The judiciary has decided that judicial control must stop at the door of the offices where social peace of the docks is negotiated. By avoiding delving into whether the calculation is fair or democratic, the court limits itself to checking that the administrative paperwork is in order, allowing a representation model from the last century to survive in a globalized economy that demands transparency and competitiveness. This ruling reinforces a legal certainty that, in practice, only benefits those who already hold power. Thus, a system is consolidated where representativity is not measured by the number of actual votes in the port area, but by the lobbying capacity of the sectors that control the physical key to loading and unloading. The impact of this ruling transcends the borders of the Canary Islands and sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of the Spanish port system. By endorsing that the Administration can choose its union interlocutor under criteria that exclude the majority of the port labor fabric, it jeopardizes trade union freedom in its dimension of institutional representation. The stevedore right emerges from the courts not only undefeated but legitimized to continue managing the Port Authority of Las Palmas as an entity where plurality is an uncomfortable concept and alternation, a legal impossibility.
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