Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ... - e-Archivo

As for the demands of strikers, surprisingly, conflicts over wages or hours of
work were not the most salient. There were serious disagreements about the payment
of piece rates or time rates when the collective contracts for the olive-picking
campaign were negotiated (Pérez Yruela, 1979: 137). Often, conflicts revolved
around the issue of local labor exchanges and the list of employable workers, with
strikers demanding the preferential hiring of local laborers at the expense of foreign
workers (El Sol 9 July 1931; El Sol 11 November 1931).
Outside the harvest months, the management of employment concentrated a
large proportion of conflicts. In the town of Rute in Córdoba, “several hundred
workers, with wives and children, concentrated in front of the town hall to protest
against unemployment” (Pérez Yruela, 1979: 122). In the summer of 1931, anarchosyndicalist
unions led a series of strikes to insist on the preferential hiring of local
workers over non-local inmigrants and demanding the hiring of household heads for
several months after the end of the harvest season. To end the strike of Bujalance
(Córdoba) in 1931, employers guaranteed employment for all local, male workers
until the 15 th of August and accepted employing more workers in shorter shifts until
the end of October (Pérez Yruela, 1979: 126-7).
With respect to land invasions, land seizures were rare in the provinces studied
here. Large biases in the evidence are possible, but newspapers reported numerous
cases of genuine land seizures in the neighboring province of Huelva or in the region
of Extremadura. Often, land invasions in the provinces studied here occurred because
picket lines entered the estates to clash with strikebreakers. In Arjona, laborers
19