This research studies the situation of the labor movement in the city of Santa Coloma de Gramenet (SCG) during the period between 1968 and 1978, as well as the labor conflict that occurred, the gestation of a new trade unionism. Everything, in the convulsed context of a country that lived social struggles in many cities, and in a time when there was no day to talk about a strike, a detainee, or a death.
The interest in doing the present research arises from the need to fill the historiographic, and therefore knowledgeable, void that exists on the labor movement in Santa Coloma de Gramenet. The work carried out so far on the city has focused its research on the association movement, considering workers’ struggles as residual or peripheral phenomena.
The hypothesis of this research is that although Santa Coloma did not have any industrial estate or large industries, a series of small and medium-sized companies, metal, textiles, leather, construction, etc. were created. . They formed a workers’ and vindictive body that coincided with the social demands posed by the associative and neighborhood movement, generating a citizenship with ethical, political and cultural principles that were opposed to those of the dictatorship.
The research, situates the evolution of how Santa Coloma happened to be a mainly agricultural and summer town for the citizens of Barcelona, to become a City, the effects that emigration had in this process and as faced by the Francoist authorities of the time. The fact is that regardless of the investment needs that the demographic increase required, the city council opted to segregate an important part of the territory of Santa Coloma, the right part of the Besòs, which was sold in the city of Barcelona. In that part, three of the four largest companies in Santa Coloma had already been installed at that time. This conditioned the future economic development that took place in the city.
The result was a city with problems of housing, of all kinds of services, with transport, etc.
In order to make an approximation to the creation of the democratic fabric in SCG, I take stock of the role that the Church had in the city, creating social centers in the neighborhood, analyzing the role of some of these priests in their respective parishes as well, as their involvement in the neighborhoods what role they played in the struggles that take place in the city
