Although the Spanish transition to democracy resulted in political institutions fundamentally different from those of the dictatorship, it did not take place in an institutional vacuum. Instead, it was profoundly infl uenced by the institutions and policy makers of the Franco regime. Furthermore, the way in which the transition unfolded had ramifi cations for the choices of political actors, the development of the labor movement, and the institutionalization of the industrial relations system in democratic Spain. The dynamics and exigencies of the transition process favored some actors and disadvantaged others and thus posed limits on the extent to which organized labor could access crucial policy-making arenas and affect policies. The labor movement had emerged from the Franco years as one of the strongest and most visible parts of the democratic opposition and had a very different role during the transition. The new tasks involved fi rst and foremost, supporting the nascent democracy in the context of an economic crisis; second, shaping labor relations institutions; and third, building union organizations. Two of these goals, the construction of an industrial relations system and the support of democracy, were explicitly political processes that linked unions to other actors in the political arena. Thus, unions paid particular attention to strategies that could secure their access to those policy-making arenas that would set the rules for the new industrial relations system.