There’s a good chance that when you read this on a break from work or just after you’ve finished your grueling 8-hour day. There’s also a good chance that you’ve passed by the Three Chimneys of Paralelo, that factory testimony that the avenue has near the port, a handful of times.
What you are perhaps less likely to know is that your working day and those chimneys are closely related, and that if it were not for a strike that began in that same place 106 years ago, you would have a lot more hours left than you have now to finish working.
It is a coincidence that the first reduction of the working day in 40 years has coincided with the 106th anniversary of La Canadenca, the strike started in Barcelona more than a century ago that allowed to obtain the mythical 8-hour working day that now, 106 years later, has been reduced for the first time.
And it is that in 1919 years began the strike of La Canadenca, the strike that favored the imposition in the world, for the first time, of the 8-hour working day, marking Barcelona with an intense red dot in the history of workers’ struggles.
The Barcelona strike that changed the world
The strike of La Canadenca in 1919, but it has its origin in the great historical events that Europe had been living in recent years. The 1st World War had left the European and Catalan economy in tatters, and the working population was suffering its consequences while becoming increasingly politicized, thanks to events such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the expansion of workers’ movements throughout industrial Europe.
At that time, workers literally worked from dawn to dusk, with 10 to 16-hour workdays, 6-day weeks and child exploitation perfectly normalized. If we add to that the impoverishment of their wages due to the European economic crisis, the strike was served.
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In this context, the company Riegos y Fuerza del Ebro, a Barcelona subsidiary of Light and Power, nicknamed La Canadenca because of the company’s origin (and based in Barcelona in the Three Chimneys), wanted to reduce the wages of its workers.
The company, one of the main suppliers of electricity in the city, did not calculate the effects of the measure, and provoked a workers’ strike that would last more than a month and that would end up generating one of the most important workers’ victories in history.
Workers against the army
https://twitter.com/historiesdebcn/status/1622202128260382720
The escalation of tension between the company and the workers began with a few layoffs, then with a hundred, and finally with a strike that came to paralyze 70% of the industrial activity of the city.
On February 5, 1919 the CNT declared a strike, affecting companies in which La Canadenca had a stake(Catalana de Gas, Ferrocarril de Sarrià a Barcelona and Societat General d’Aigües) and causing a general shortage of supplies in the city, where the citizens had to resort to scarce coal to make up for the lack of electricity.
For its part, the Government declared a state of war, sent the army to Barcelona and armed civilians (the sometents) to patrol the city and ended up imprisoning more than 3,000 strikers. Among them was Salvador Seguí, El Noi del Sucre, one of the most outstanding figures of Spanish workerism, assassinated by the bosses’ gunmen a few years later, in 1923, where the Rambla del Raval is now.
https://twitter.com/CatalunyaColor/status/1622141811627016192
The strength of the protests and the harshness of the repression made the government fear an expansion of the strike to other areas. So, after more than 40 days of strike, several meetings between the strike committee and the authorities were held during March 15 and 16, and the protest was ended.
The final agreement included the release of prisoners, readmission of the strikers without reprisals, wage increases and the establishment of the 8-hour workday. The workers approved the agreement at a rally with 25,000 people in Las Arenas led by Salvador Seguí, thus accepting a key change in the working day that lasts to this day and, more than a hundred years later, still remains the same. Perhaps it is time for another change?