Two 14-year-olds will be admitted to work in the fields. They must know how to plow and dig vineyards. Candidates who know how to read and write will be preferred, all things being equal.
Amazed as we are with the artificial intelligence revolution and its possible catastrophic effect on employment, it is interesting to remember where we came from. The job offer published in La Vanguardia on October 9, 1881 illustrates very well the situation of the labor market in Catalonia 142 years ago: the majority worked in the countryside, in very hard jobs and from a very early age age And the literacy rate was very low, knowing how to read and write was considered an advantage to be able to get a job.
In 1881, the year La Vanguardia was born, more than 50% of the active population of Catalonia was employed in the agricultural sector, compared to only 1.2% today. As can be seen in the graph, industrial employment was already a significant share, since it then represented 35% of the total, while the services sector was around 20%.
The rapid modernization of the Catalan economy made this pre-eminent condition of agricultural employment disappear between the years 1910 and 1920 in favor of industry (we are actually talking about the secondary sector, that is, industry and construction), which has been the dominant sector by far for seventy years, roughly until 1981-1991. As the economic historian Jordi Maluquer de Motes states in his study The industrialization of Catalonia: a historiographic balance, from that moment on, industry was overtaken by the service sector as the most important employer.
In Spain as a whole, on the other hand, this phenomenon of economic modernization that symbolizes the loss of the dominant position of agriculture did not arrive until 1970, fifty years later than in Catalonia. In Spanish history, on the other hand, industry has never become the majority sector. As Maluquer highlights, “the country went directly from an agrarian society to a service society, highlighting great differences with respect to the pattern of growth of the industrial class followed by Catalonia with remarkable anticipation”. One more reason for the disagreement between territories.
In fact, Professor Jordi Maluquer’s study describes the industrialization of Catalonia as a “pioneering process in the south of the European continent”. A process that has also progressed “without high-intensity accelerations or suffered from particularly violent short-term fluctuations, partly due to its structural diversity but also due to its solid base of small and medium-sized companies”.
The First World War, in any case, did contribute to a faster expansion of the industrial sector in Catalonia, reaching a peak in the 1930s and a subsequent decline due to the Civil War. It was a time of prosperity linked to an increase in sales to the European countries at war, and also the take-off of trade unions and large strikes in demand for better working conditions.
After the Spanish conflict, industrial employment rose again, but it was from a new peak in 1975 that it began to decline, to be overtaken by services between 1981 and 1991 as the main source of employment. .
Catalonia and Spain as a whole are now fundamentally tertiaryized economies and more homogeneous in this sense. The services sector contributes 73.5% of employment in Catalonia, compared to 72.5% in Spain as a whole. The boom in tourism is largely responsible for this rise to the detriment of industry, which thanks to improvements in technology is a less labor-intensive sector but with much more productivity. The concern lies in the loss of income for workers as a result of this change in the productive model: wages are much higher in industry, which also provides greater job stability.
