A rancher on a cattle farm.
The labor reform, the closure of farms, and mainly livestock farms, as well as the forceful entry of mechanization, on the other hand positive to improve the quality of life of those who continue, have sunk hiring in the primary sector by 20, 3 percent this summer in relation to the summer period of 2021, although it is at least half that of the national fall, where it was close to 39 percent. Castilla y León registered 20,788 work contracts in agriculture and livestock in the month of July of this year, 65 percent of them, indefinite, one of the consequences of the labor reform, in a sector in which there is a large percentage of temporality due to production circumstances.
This overall figure represents 6,000 fewer contracts than in 2021, one year prior to the entry of the labor reform, effective from April 1, 2022, when three out of four workers employed by others in the sector were for ‘work and service’, that is, for the established time of the duration of the specific works, a figure that was used above all in agriculture in harvest seasons, irrigation or crop harvesting, such as potatoes.
Now the scenario is quite different. The president of Asaja Castilla y León, Donaciano Dujo, assured that in general, the agricultural and livestock entrepreneur “is finding it very difficult to find labor to work in the fields”, something that is even more complicated if the demand is from “qualified and national employment. It is necessary to have workers without knowledge of the subject, who have never done this work before and have no experience, who are taught their work on the farm the day they start. For certain seasonal activities, when the worker has learned, the job is over,” Dujo lamented in statements to Ical.
The union official attributed the notable drop in hiring to three other reasons, in addition to the labor reform. The first, on which the sector has insisted for decades, is the galloping crisis that agriculture and livestock are experiencing and that has forced the closure of “quite a few farms, in the greatest number of cases, of ranchers.”
In second place, there is the consolidated mechanization of farms, “increasingly”, such as dairy cattle, where milking robots have been installed “that do it alone or large rooms that require less hands working”. This mechanization has obviously also reached agriculture, where the grape harvest or potato harvest is less and less manual.
Finally, in a year “as catastrophic” as 2023, with drought and a notable increase in expenses due to the rise in prices, the farmer and rancher “gets by as best he can”, continued Donaciano Dujo, “and tries to have the least expenses possible”. This section also includes reducing the hiring of personnel and asking favors from family or friends at specific times of the different campaigns. It has also had to do with the fact that numerous livestock farms have reduced the number of their cabins with the sacrifice of animals.
2023-08-27 03:40:35
#primary #sector #sinks #contracting #percent #Adelantado #Segovia
