The identity of Bellvitge is inextricably linked to work in one way or another. The next game of
Bellvitge live role-playing
, which we will play next Saturday, June 13, is about that, about work and days. The very origin of Bellvitge—and so many other housing estates on the urban peripheries throughout Spain—is linked to the thousands of people who emigrated in the 60s and 70s to the urban centers to work in the factories. At that historical moment, in the industrial belt of Barcelona, a workers’ movement resurfaces, stifled for decades by Francoism. However, there is another sphere of work, mainly feminized, that does not appear in the chronicles and is not sufficiently recognized as an essential element in the historical constitution of Bellvitge: all the enormous amount of work that women carried out in the domestic sphere—both reproductive and care work, as well as submerged and outsourced productive work by companies—.
In
Works and Days
we want to collectively construct a story about this issue and we invite you to join us on Saturday, June 13 at 11:30 am in the
Old Market of Bellvitge
and play with us. Again we will have the collaboration of the women’s group of the Parish Mare de Dèu de Bellvitge, which on this occasion will be joined by the theater group of Akelharre Jove and the Association of Vendors of the Municipal Market of Bellvitge. As always, we will have the collaboration of the
Necronomicon’s Role-Playing Club
and also, on this occasion, the game will coincide with the already traditional
Festa del Sol
organized by various entities in the neighborhood:
AVV de Bellvitge
,
Tallers Bellvitge
, Comissió de Festes de Bellvitge – La Marina, Kampi ki pugui and
la Saboga
. Below is a more extensive introduction to the scene in which we develop some of the points mentioned above:
Today is August 1, 1979. Manuel López Lozano, the first democratic mayor of Abrera, a small town in the Baix Llobregat, is currently hospitalized. He suffers probably irreparable damage to his spinal cord caused by a shot, they say accidental, fired by an agent of the
The next day, various acts of protest against the events took place throughout the Baix Llobregat. The uncertainty about the state of Manuel López Lozano, a member of the Communist Party and CC.OO., as well as the imprecise information about the reasons for the altercation, have strained the atmosphere throughout the industrial belt of Barcelona. In Abrera there was a real general strike and stoppages and assemblies took place throughout the region. In the SEAT factory, with 30,000 workers, many of them residents of Bellvitge, an informative assembly was organized in which a councilor from Abrera participated.
The massive and forceful social response to the Abrera incident is proof of the political commitment and the relevant role of the workers’ movements, in solidarity and symbiosis with neighborhood associations, during the period of democratic transition. This role is often relegated to the background in the predominant discourses on the democratic transition and perhaps its study has not yet been sufficiently deepened.
Barris, veïns i democràcia
(L’Avenç, 2014), written by the journalist and historian Marc Andreu, constitutes, for example, one of the recent efforts to recover this memory in the city of Barcelona.
The day before, CC.OO., UGT and CSUT have called for a four-hour strike with assembly throughout Catalonia today, which in various cases will end with concentrations in front of the town halls. The workers of SEAT and other important companies in the Zona Franca cross Bellvitge on their way to Hospitalet. A group of workers, residents of Bellvitge, comment on the incident when they notice, as they pass through the market, that a woman is arguing heatedly with a young man. They approach to see what is happening: apparently the young man works for a textile company, every week he arrives in the neighborhood with his van to deliver pieces of clothing that the woman will sew at home and collect the finished pieces. The young man has communicated a reduction in the price that the company will pay for each piece sewn, which has aroused the protests of the woman. How will the discussion end?
In the 70s, low wages forced many workers to work a large amount of overtime, in many cases to be able to pay the mortgages on the apartments acquired in neighborhoods and housing estates such as Bellvitge. Women, mostly dedicated to domestic, reproductive and care work, also joined production as an outsourced workforce, almost always in conditions of extreme precariousness, without social guarantees and without the possibility of organizing collectively. Sewing or finishing clothes, skins or rhinestones, stuffing cards, assembling belt buckles, pens, painting Airgam Boys, welding electronic circuits… the most varied tasks that could be carried out at home, outside factories and workshops. We could understand this fragmentation of the productive process, as well as the precariousness and isolation of the workers, as a post-Fordist expression of the capitalist system, which was already advancing in the 70s a model and forms of subjectivity widely extended today. However, these forms of work and exploitation were omitted by the main currents of the workers’ movement and no effort was made to analyze the phenomenon and fight for the improvement of the working conditions of these women.
On the other hand, the history of the workers’ movements and trade unionism in Catalonia has been extensively studied. The workers’ movement itself, associated with factory work carried out mainly by men, has instruments to preserve its memory. However, the work necessary for social reproduction itself carried out by women, which includes care and attention, education and emotional support, the maintenance of spaces and domestic goods, not only lacks economic recognition, but also lacks a socially shared memory and story. On the occasions when the role of women in the neighborhood is made visible—on the occasion of March 8, for example—their self-denial and sacrifice are valued, without going into denouncing the mechanisms of domination that conditioned—and condition—the lives of women and for which they were forced to ‘selflessly sacrifice’ for their husbands and children.
In turn, the memory of the workers’ movement has its own gaps: one of the perhaps least recognized phenomena of that era to which the scene Works and Days refers, in which the trade union formations were consolidated as we know them today, is that of workers’ autonomism. The Baix Llobregat was one of the points in the entire Spanish state in which this movement reached the most relevance through the