The forms of the salary in the pampas agriculture: its role to disciplin, improve productivity and cheapen the workforce

Abstract

The socio-economic, political and labour union transformations followed in the late 70 ´s, started an adverse period for the work conditions of the agricultural employees. There was a trend developed towards the decrease of the times required for each task, the discontinuation of the productive process, a more seasonable demand of employment, and an increase of the specialization of the workforce. The extreme fragmentation of the productive process derived this way in the splinter of the worker ´s labour cycle in terms of incomes and employers. In this context, it was possible to impose and naturalize different forms and levels of remuneration for each one of the agricultural tasks, still in the cases in which a worker realized all of them for the same boss as a permanent labourer, and singularly in the cases of temporary workers who face different employers to develop each task to build their occupational cycle. We propose to analyze the role that this combination of wage forms and levels has been playing for the cheapen of the agricultural workforce, as well as an encouragment to a major productivity and in the abortion of opened or large-scale conflicts between this fraction of the rural working class and his bosses, in spite of the adverse conditions of work that we check in this study