Rural Workers and Unionism

class struggle on Evora’s first rural unionist movement (1910-1912)

Abstract

Following the Republican Revolution, a series of social conflicts by rural workers emerged in Alentejo, to the surprise of all political and social spectrums (from republicans to anarchists), whose actions and consequences went far beyond the usual banditry associated with the cost of living. The materialisation of these conflicts into dynamics specific to rural social movements, through the practice of organised strikes and politicised collective demands, was a novelty in the labour reality of the Alentejo countryside and, in this sense, deserves in-depth study. In this article, using a set of unpublished documents from the Evora District Archive, we intend to dissect the dynamics of the first union outbreak in the history of rural labour in Portugal, as well as its impact on rural society in Évora through the strike movement it triggered, ending with the Evora Strike of January 1912.