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The strike began in February 1919, during the epidemic’s third wave, and brought Barcelona to a grinding halt. In January, the Ebro Irrigation and Power Company, known as La Canadiense for its Toronto headquarters, lowered wages, and fired 8
oficinistas, white-collar workers, for protesting. When 140 blue-collar workers were barred reentry after walking out in solidarity, they appealed to the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a union that had gained enormous traction in Barcelona over the previous year. The CNT called a general strike, spreading the word “as if it were an epidemic transmitted through air, spreading through contact,” as activist and historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II writes in his account of the period,