Temporary workers in globalized agriculture. A case study in the province of Tucumán, Argentina.

GUILLERMO NEIMAN

Maringa

Simposio; International Symposium on Work in Agriculture; 2016

Universidad Estadual de Maringá, Paraná, Brazil

Currently, in the context of social and productive restructuring for sustaining continuous processes of capital accumulation, farms resort to changes in the organization of the work process and in forms of labor hiring as well. Thus, a "flexible" agriculture will affect, among other dimensions, labor markets, conditions occupation, types of workers, labor relations, workers´ recruitment, and the labor management.It is generally agreed that deepening the development of capitalism favored the use of temporary workers rather than permanent, allowing for more flexible labor relations and facilitating capital accumulation. In turn, the deregulation of markets generates greater job insecurity and impacts heavily on the lives and work of employees: low wages, deprived working and living conditions, limited access to social benefits, absence or low participation in labor unions, scarce upward occupational mobility, lack of training opportunities, high turnover, are among the main characteristics.In Argentina, during the last decades, agriculture has been undergoing a steady growth for a variety of crops and in different regions of the country (reaching approximately 30 million of cultivated hectares with around 125 million tons of annual production). Among other consequences, this process has not led to a stabilization employment nor to a substantial improvement of the main parameters with which its work quality is assessed. As a matter of fact, temporary work has increased in traditional productions as well as in reestructured productions in the context of ongoing globalization trends.The overall objective of this paper is to generate knowledge about the conditions of agricultural employment in the current stage of restructuring activity, mainly considering the situation of temporary employees regarding their access to seasonal work, occupations and career paths.The working hypotheses that guide this study are:(A) The new conditions set in the organization of production and work among large farms modify the characteristics of temporary employment, increasing the supply of workers with urban or rural residence from households with limited access to alternative livelihoods as, for example, land. (B) The temporary work is associated with occupational strategies of individuals and households in order to diminish labor instability and low annual incomes.(C) The lack of continuity in employment is reflected in the annual cycle of work of these employees with frequent periods of unemployment forcing them to seek employment in other sectors of the economy or regularly move to other areas.First, this paper describes the internal differences of temporary workforce in agriculture considering largely laborers? personal characteristics as well as specific working conditions. Second, labor trajectories of these workers are being analyzed according to temporary workers? social origin, age, gender and place of residence (rural or urban).Methodologically, data from a recently implemented household survey of agrarian wage workers, complemented with in‐depth interviews to selected workers are the main perspectives and sources of information that have been used. Fieldwork was conducted in the province of Tucuman, located at the northern region of Argentina, where classical productions such as sugarcane coexist alongside with others of more recent expansion as fruit (lemon), soybeans, blueberries and vegetables.