Participation

PARTICIPATION. - I. NATURE. - An agrarian contract by which the individual worker provides his labor for given crops, in return for compensation consisting of a predetermined share of the produce. The contract is annual and may concern either one crop or a group of crops. It may cover an entire farm, in its organic unity, or it may refer, which happens much more frequently, to specific plots. Usually the sharecropper receives a parcel of land already sown, or planted with tree crops in production, and carries out on it all the manual operations necessary up to the harvest, also bearing certain cultivation expenses in proportion to the ratio by which the produce is divided.

The contract generally applies to crops that require a large amount of labor (maize, sugar beet, tobacco, tomato, wheat) or to those that, besides quantity, also demand a high quality of labor (vine, almond, etc.).

The sharecroppers are the agricultural day laborers themselves, who avail themselves of this contract to supplement the cash wages they receive for other activities. And it frequently happens that the same day laborer is at the same time a sharecropper on several farms, even distant from one another.

This figure of worker possesses the characteristic features of the day laborer. It should be said, however, that besides day laborers, very many small landowners and tenants also appear as sharecroppers, especially in the south, when the farm they work is not sufficient to provide for the elementary necessities of life of the family.

II. TYPES OF PARTICIPANTS

Within the infinite range of types and sub-types of sharecroppers, the following fundamental groupings may be discerned: a) the partitanti of the Po Valley (especially in Venetia and Emilia), where the division of the product takes place in proportions ranging between 30 and 40%. They almost always contribute to the expenses for artificial fertilizers; b) the sharecroppers of the masserie (large-scale farms) of southern Italy. There appear both casual laborers and permanent ones, to whom are entrusted broad beans, wheat and fruit-tree crops. The share of the division ranges between a third and a half of the total product; c) the sharecroppers on the extensive lands of the south. Here there is the greatest contractual tangle. No longer the day laborers, but the small landowners and the small tenants (terraticanti) take on the work. And it ranges from fixed shares of the product to proportional shares, low in themselves and very low in terms of what they represent in actual product, in relation to the scant productivity and the great uncertainty of the crops.

III. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF PARTICIPATION

The positive aspects of the sharecropping contract can be enumerated as follows: a) it is a typical associative contract; b) the sharecropper is permitted to put to profitable use the labor potential of his family members, including the minor workers, with a notable increase in the overall income of the family unit, which is thereby consolidated; c) it trains the farm laborer in the running of a small agricultural enterprise (sharecropping tenancy, small leaseholding). Its drawbacks, though not exclusive to it, are: d) the low labor income frequently imposed by current contractual arrangements; e) the intense exploitation of the family's labor force.

IV. PROSPECTS FOR IMPROVEMENT

Certainly the practice of sharecropping is also capable of being reformed with the twofold aim of increasing the compensation to which the worker is entitled and of elevating his human personality.

Generally, and in the trade-union sphere, efforts are uniformly directed toward a more advantageous share in the division of the produce and toward the abolition of the worker's contribution to expenses, attenuating this contribution as much as possible. Now, in this matter it is indispensable to proceed with prudence and with a perfect understanding of the economic possibilities of the agricultural holdings. Excessive demands can bring about the unprofitability of the contract, and it may happen, as it has already happened, that the entrepreneur prefers to replace it with a plain and simple return to pure wage forms. There would thus be a contractual regression, a halt in the process of transformation and of the farmhand's passage toward socially more desirable relationships.

In the sharecropping contract the productivity aspect must never be neglected. Every reform of it must likewise aim at an increase in production, from which alone a real improvement in the sharecropper's living conditions is to be expected. Correct, then, the shares of division, but with due consideration, with a careful examination of local situations and possibilities. And to the sharecropper let there be assured equally ample technical assistance (temporary courses for peasants, experimental fields, etc.) and, in the matter of social assistance, assimilation to the welfare forms currently in force for other categories of workers.

Dario Perini

For other enterprises, v.: AZIENDA; IMPRENDITORE; PARTECIPAZIARISMO.