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Portugal The Lower Class
Portuguese have long used the all-encompassing term
o
povo to describe the lower class. O povo means
"the
people," but the term has a class connotation, as well.
Analysts
of Portuguese society have postulated that o povo
encompasses perhaps four main groups, including
agricultural
workers who either owned or did not own land and organized
and
unorganized labor in urban areas.
Ownership of land was the main criterion for
subdividing the
poor in rural areas. There was a strong regional
difference in
ownership. Portugal's north was noted for its small farms
and
self-employed small farmers. Farmers who owned land tended
to be
independent, rather conservative, and strongly Catholic in
their
beliefs. They tended to vote for the center and
center-right
political parties. Within this class of smallholders, some
were
better off than others. Some were obliged to work
part-time on
other farms. Many offspring of smallholders migrated to
the
cities or emigrated abroad. Their female relatives often
remained
behind to till the land.
The rural poor of the south in the Alentejo, like those
of
the north, were often referred to as "peasants," but that
catchall term obscured important regional differences
between
these two groups. Relatively few of the o povo in
the
Alentejo owned their own land. Instead, they worked on the
region's large estates, some full-time, others perhaps
only two
days a week. Their politics were often radical, and, in
contrast
to the smallholders of the north, they tended to vote for
socialist and communist parties. The Alentejo was the area
most
strongly affected by the Revolution of 1974, and many of
the
large estates were nationalized and designated for
agrarian
reform or were taken over in a land seizure by their
workers.
Urban areas also had two major groups of the working
class,
mainly defined in terms of whether or not they were
politically
organized. The unorganized lumpen proletariat, usually
recent
arrivals from the countryside, were often unemployed or
underemployed. Members of the urban working class who
belonged to
labor unions were considerably better off and could be
regarded
as the "elite" of Portugal's lower classes.
The lumpen proletariat lived in urban slums, the most
extensive of which were in Lisbon. Migrants from the
countryside,
they were often illiterate and not members of a labor
union. Many
could find no regular work but were employed in menial
jobs on a
part-time basis. The slums they lived in were often partly
hidden
from view behind walls or fences and even in the early
1990s
frequently lacked electricity, water, and sewerage
systems. The
housing in these slums was often fabricated from any
available
materials, including fiber glass, cardboard, and tin;
hence,
these areas were called in Portuguese bairros de
lata--
neighborhoods of tin. In addition to physical hardships,
slum
dwellers had to contend with violence and crime.
Portugal's
increasing prosperity since the second half of the 1980s
had not
yet been sufficient to efface these districts, which
looked as if
they were part of the Third World.
Portugal's organized working class had a better
standard of
living than did the unskilled and unorganized poor. Their
salaries were relatively high, and they were strongly
entrenched
in Portugal's key industries. Portugal had a long history
of
urban trade unions. Under Salazar's corporative system
they were
strictly controlled, but after the Revolution of 1974 they
became
major actors in the political system and had managed to
secure
decent wages for their
membership.
Data as of January 1993
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