At the outset Colectivo Ronda was fundamentally engaged in advice on labour issues and countering repression during the dictatorship. The services gradually expanded and became a reference point for the working classes. This was a committed legal advice office devoted to caring for people's and collectives' rights in all aspects of social life. The services were extended to criminal, environmental, town-planning, alien and tax law.
It was in the 80s when we began to incorporate advice in the field of cooperativism, especially concerning claims made by workers who had been dismissed from companies as a consequence of workforce adjustment plans. Thanks to that early advice for cooperatives we now have an action department devoted to the cooperative movement and other social economy entities (associations, foundations and social initiative groups).
From labour office to cooperative with global consultancy
In 1980 Colectivo Ronda became a Catalan associated labour cooperative, which is what responds most closely to our reality and way of functioning and organising ourselves. This system favours a self-management and assembly form of organisation, in which we firmly believe. At the same time we are promoting it among the collectives we advise.
That first office made up of just a few people now brings together more than 100 professionals of all ages and profiles, counting partners and associates.
The 90s were a decade of expansion. Apart from the Barcelona and Mataró offices, which were still part of the initial core, other branches opened in Mollet, Cerdanyola, Rubí, Tarragona, Granollers and Madrid. Today we have seven work centres, with headquarters in Carrer Trafalgar in Barcelona.
At Colectivo Ronda we have evolved from an almost exclusively labour office in the 70s to a firm specialising in labour and legal and social advice, banking law, aspects of social security, conflicts with the administration and social economy.
At Colectivo Ronda we foster direct, participatory assembly-style democracy. We believe in self-management and cooperation as ways of organising work and social activity. That gives us a global view of the problems people and society have, without establishing divisions between politics and trade unionism, between personal and collective, between local and general. This universal vision, based on respect, dignity and cooperation, has allowed us to evolve in all the spheres we work in today.
