L'agriculture méditerranéenne de la France : dynamique et contradictions. Théorie du marché du travail

Intensive crops in our definition require a large amount of work per acre and a very skewed distribution of this work during the year, harvest being in general the crucial operation of a cycle of production since it requires more than half of the total annual workload over a very short period of time. If initially most crops were intensive according to this definition, thanks to mechanical advances, intensive crops are largely limited now to fruit and vegetable production which tend to be located in southern Europe. But the problems of «Mediterranean agriculture» are almost never studied from the point of view of the specific labor market they imply, sun and water being generally considered as the most important factors of production. We hold the view that this type of crops imply the emergence of a specific labor market from which all the fixed costs have been eliminated. Briefly stated the argument runs along the following lines : Harvest appears as a random operation since : - the quantities to be harvested are random and unknown until the last moment (an hail storm may destroy the crop at any time) - the moment of harvest varies widely. Since the work to be done is proportional to the quantities to be harvested (a reasonable assumption) the labor force for harvest must be immediately available in much larger number than usually necessary. Moreover, since a harvest in the barn is always worth more than in the fields, shortening the length of harvest is always profitable. This means using more workers than would be usually necessary, and it is possible only if the harvest costs are totally disconnected from the number of harvest hands. At a microeconomic level, piece rate appears as the ideal solution and at a microeconomic level, the labor market must be such that there exist always more workers available than would be necessary under the worst economic or weather conditions. Work instability and partial employement even at peak employment time are built in consequences.