Founded by Catalan collectivists and syndicalists within the existing Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (FTRE), the PUS sought to unify trade unions around demands for the eight-hour day.
It briefly continued organising as an independent trade union federation, but after a rise in anarchist terrorism provoked political repression by the Spanish state, its activities were limited.
Following the Restoration of the Spanish monarchy in the late 1870s, the prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo oversaw the creation of the turno system, in which power would alternate between the Liberal and Conservative parties.
[2] By the late 1880s, the growing anarchist movement was facing increased political repression, which led to the deterioration of the FTRE, the main national trade union federation of the period.
By 1887, its only regional federations that had been able to sustain their membership numbers were those in Catalonia and Valencia, where political repression had been less intense than it had been in its historic support bases in Andalusia, Murcia and New Castile.
[5] By 1885, the Catalan regional federation of the FTRE, which was dominated by syndicalists, had become effectively independent from the national organisation and ran its own autonomous network of trade unions (also known as "resistance societies").
[9] Although the PUS was predominantly made up of collectivist anarchists, the organisation consciously avoided using any ideological labels,[10] hoping to pre-empt any political sectarianism which they believed would prevent them from taking action.
These trade unions were bound together by a "free pact" (Spanish: libre pacto), which required them to provide mutual aid to each other in the event of a strike action.
The administration of the PUS was overseen from the organisation's headquarters in Alcoi by an executive commission, consisting of five members elected by popular assembly, which collected statistics and handled internal communications.
[15] In Andalusia, rural workers used the PUS to form an alliance between the working poor and unemployed, uniting them behind political demonstrations, boycotts and strike actions.
[22] The strike began with a rally at the Teatre Tívoli [ca], before the workers marched down La Rambla towards the residency of the Civil Governor of Barcelona [es].
[28] The Spanish state revived the Mano Negra conspiracy theory and initiated a wave of political repression against the anarchist movement, culminating in the Jerez uprising of January 1892.
In 1900, a coalition of trade unions, including many from the PUS who had managed to survive the repression of the 1890s, established the Federation of Workers' Societies of the Spanish Region (FSORE).