Throughout Montevideo's 300 years history we will find traces, here and there, of the work
of its
inhabitants. Marks and traditions that condense the rich and heterogeneous memory of its protagonists.
The work world, the subjectivities it forged, and its impact on personal and collective
identity have
been an inescapable line of continuity in the history of this city. Montevideo accumulates an enormous
and rich tradition of workers' organisations of all political and ideological stances,
which at
different times and contexts advocated for improving living conditions and envisioning different
possible futures for this political community.
The workers' movement emerged in our city in the last third of the 19th century. Like this
a process
began, not linear at all, in which, after the emergence and extinction of various federations and trade
union centres, the National Workers Convention (CNT) was created in 1964, a space of coordination that
consolidated the long road towards the unity of the labour movement.
The industrial development that can be traced along all Montevideo, occurs hand in hand with whole neighbourhoods that built themselves at their own impulse and at the implacable rhythm of change. Slaughter houses, textiles, tenneries important industries such as the refinery Ancap, the tires enterprise Funsa, or the railway workshops of the neighbourhood Peñarol, served as binding elements for the workers organisation and as knots of local and neighbourhood identity.
In the face of the coup d'état in 1973, the trade union movement responded with the historical general strike: the occupation of the working places along length and width of the whole city was immediate, as it also was the persecution started by the Armed Forces.
Towards the end of the authoritarian regime, on May 1st, 1984, the movement synthesized the union between the PIT (Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores) created years before, during the struggle against the dictatorship and the CNT, under the slogan “One single trade union movement”. Thus, the streets, corners, squares, industrial establishments, factories and workshops of this city were the scenery of one of the most significant movements -due to the scope of its demands- of our country.
