ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explain how the region's world of labor was structured during the early 1950s. It discusses the earliest historical references dealing with the kind of labor relations that were established in the context of the two main production activities Central America centered on in the first half of the twentieth century: coffee and bananas. The chapter analyzes the employment structure that existed in the region in 1950 based on the information in the corresponding national censuses and identifies the productive and reproductive logic that shaped this structure. Three types of work systems occurred within the Central American coffee economy during early twentieth century: the coercive system, the wage system, and the family system. The chapter concludes by offering a profile of the type of labor actor that emerged and developed in the 1950s; this is done in order to determine the former's situation and to realize what plans were being made to face the process of modernization.
