The Rural Agricultural Labourers

CHAPTERS

The poor peasants and the rural agricultural labourers stood exceedingly close to each other. In most cases only a cottage and a bit of land formed the difference, which could disappear into nothing in the case of a long-term illness or a bad harvest. Their numbers were extremely high and even between the two world wars amounted to one third of the total population.

One part of them strove to move into the higher stratum of the peasantry, but a decisive majority judged this to be futile, since too many such experiments failed. Thus they grew closer and closer to the industrial workers in their life style and organization. Their miserable situation forced them to abandon the traditional culture in clothing, in furniture, and in many other respects, yet at the same time they not only maintained, but also enriched their intellectual culture.

Their inhuman fate urged them to organize, which, however, did not always succeed in meeting with similar movements on the part of the industrial workers. During the last decades of the past century they often came into conflict with the authorities. Not infrequently the police and soldiers beat down their campaigns aimed at dividing the land of the landowners. Their situation became so bad in so many areas that it caused a mass migration to America. Between 1890 and 1914 more than {79.} one million indigent farm labourers sought better living conditions in the USA, and most of these never returned home.

In what follows we will introduce several characteristic groups of rural agricultural labourers. Some of these exist over the entire language territory while others are limited to certain areas. Their characteristic is that, contrary to the occupational layers (tobacco, melon, onion, paprika, etc. growers), they did not sell any products, but only their own manpower. Furthermore, in most cases they had to accept work in faraway places.