The Portuguese emigrant worker in the capitalist industrial society

Abstract

The «gratification» the Portuguese emigrant gets through industrial work depends on his «adjustment» to the foreign industrial society; but this adjustment is difficult a priori, if not impossible, on account of this situation of marginality. After discussing the theoretical bases of the question, the author follows the social-professional itinerary of the Portuguese emigrant taking for a starting point the data of a research that fell upon a sample of 114 workers living in France and Federal Germany. Through the analysis of that itinerary of the emigrant worker after his departure from Portugal up to the moment of the research, the author tries to ascertain the influence of a certain number of variables about the binomial «gratification through industrial work adjustment to the foreign industrial society». The author concluded that the adjustment is difficult and the «integration» still more, for the first generation, but he is inclined to think that the situation will be different for the second generation. The change of an attitude of passivity into «a working-class identification» may clearly improve the processus of adaptation.