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

disillusion (…) among the landless poor and unemployed of the rural south
exasperated by the durability of the old relations of power (Graham, 2005: 14).
Similarly, Stanley Payne argued that in the spring of 1934, “the most active role in
labor affairs was taken by the UGT’s farmworker federation, the FNTT, centered in
Extremadura and Andalusia.” FNTT strength was explained by the fact that “whereas
conditions for urban workers had deteriorated only slightly, there was a growing sense
of desperation among rural laborers, who had suffered an increase in more than 50 per
cent in unemployment during the past two years”(Payne, 2006: 60-61).
Some have argued unemployment responded to mechanization and the
intensification of production methods, but James Simpson’s calculations showed
labor supply did not outstrip labor demand in Andalusia in the period 1886-1935,
especially because agricultural land increased faster than population in the period and
mechanization was slow (Simpson, 1992: 16). But Carmona and Simpson (2003)
focused on changes in the demand for different types of workers with agrarian
development in the early 20 th century, with (slow) mechanization and output
expansion favoring workers with permanent contracts, tenants, and the gangs of
temporary migrants at the expense of the local pool of casual laborers (Carmona and
Simpson, 2003: 112-13). In addition, short run changes in labor demand were perhaps
more important. The casual proletariat did not have ways of diversifying away the
risk of poor harvests and struggled with seasonal income variation (Brenan, 2008:
120). If the harvest was poor, labor demand fell and greater underemployment or
unemployment followed. Unemployed laborers did not have access to financial
services to smooth income shocks and there were more restrictions to temporary
migrations in the 1930s (Domenech, 2013).
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