The corporative triangle. A case of State intervention: the wages in the cotton industry (1946-47)

Abstract

The author analyses the making of a draft regulation providing for fixing the wages and conditions of work in the cotton textile industry. The text goes back to 1934 and then forward to 1952 so as to enable a better understanding of the whole process. The employers and workers concerned did not react passively or indifferently to this State intervention. On the contrary, they played important parts on a scene of exchanges, pressures and conflicts. The text describes the most decisive moments of the discussion held in a tripartite committee, specially that regarding to the most polemical subject of it, i.e. the wages, while stressing the positions, arguments and strategies of the diverse actores. Finally, the author wonders about both the meaning of the social policy of the «Estado Novo» and the complex relationship between employers and State. Such a relationship is not at all free from conflicts and reveals, in the case under study, an important, strongly resistant pressure group of employers and a State possibly less strong than it appears to be.