Origins of the labor movement in Spain

Workers of a Catalan textile factory.

The origins of the labor movement in Spain are located in Catalonia in the 1830s and 1840s, since it was the only place in Spain where there was a modern industry: the textile industry. There the first conflicts between workers and employers took place and there the first trade union — called "resistance societies" at the time — in the history of Spain, the Barcelona Weavers Association, was founded in 1840. The first general strike took place during the progressive biennium - a period of extension of the movement to other areas of Spain. By 1865, the first Workers' Congress was held in Barcelona. After the triumph of the Glorious Revolution, the right to freedom of association was recognized for the first time, which put an end, at least momentarily, to the persecutions and prohibitions that the incipient labor movement had suffered during the previous forty years.

With the formation in Spain of the first two groups of the International Workingmen's Association in 1869, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona, a new stage in the history of the labor movement in Spain began, during which, as Manuel Tuñón de Lara said: "for the first time class consciousness was expressed at a level where the entire system of relations of production, institutions and values was called into question."