From work to unemployment and from unemployment to financial help: Changes in the work cultures of Andalusian laborers

The author analyzes the gradual loss of social identity of Andalusian day laborers through the combined effects of the modernization of agrarian structures and government subsidies for temporary workers. The thread of the author's analysis is the concept of work cultures and their role in the formation of social identities. With this epistemological instrument, he reconstructs the material basis of the work processes (i.e., the know-how, the technical organization, the control systems) as well as the day laborers' representations of their job(i.e., their values, symbols, perceptions, etc.) within the context of specific relations of production. As the basis of reproduction of those work cultures disappear, so do the day laborers as a self-conscious social group, who then become no more than an administrative category, earmarked for government handouts. They are made redundant by the mechanization of agriculture, yet have no future in the productive economy.