Tabacchine, condizioni di lavoro e disoccupazione nel Salento negli anni Trenta del Novecento

Tobacco female workers’ working conditions and unemployment in Salento region in the 1930s. The heavy economic and social repercussions of the “great depression” of the 1930s involved in a significant way also the protected sector of tobacco cultivation, which in the first post-war period had experienced an important process of development and modernization especially in Salento region. In the province of Lecce the effects of the crisis are evident in the employment situation, in wage conditions, in the employment trend of the seasonal female labor force, hit by a high rate of unemployment. In this economic situation tobacco female workers become the protagonists of a growing conflict, barely controlled by fascism, which will re-explode in a more disruptive way in the fifties and sixties, in the “brave and dramatic” season of political commitment, union demands, social redemption.