Article by Josep Garcia, Training Secretary of CGT Catalonia

We are following with interest all the debate that has been taking place lately, especially here in the city of Barcelona, around neighborhood unionism. We are interested, to the extent that it is clear that there are activist sectors, sectors of social movements, who feel the need to put the field of salaried exploitation on their agenda of struggle, and generate territorialized networks of solidarity and mutual support to defend labor rights through direct action.
This seems important to us, because we know that there are many people who have lived on their backs for a long time in the world of salaried work, while generating a discourse of rejection that prevented them from conceiving this as a battlefield (just as we conceive of other spaces in our everyday life as such), and this despite having to earn the carobs, like most, allowing themselves to be exploited in the capitalist market.

I think that all of us here must have spent many hours of our lives in our neighborhoods or towns building spaces of autonomy with many other people, self-management projects, etc. For some of us, that we have arrived at trade unionism from militancy in social movements, it has always been difficult to understand that there were colleagues who were hyperactive in a thousand moves outside of work, but what, However, were completely canceled once they crossed the door of the work center. That they become there in what we call a "Padefo" (in other words that is, a “Fucking Step”). As if work is not part of life, as if the job (what, we already know, it is a space of alienation) was not also a key determinant of our possibilities to realize ourselves, individually and collectively.

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