ABSTRACT
The Great Depression impoverished the Costa Rican working class. Education was universal and literacy rates were the highest in the region. Political parties were legal and political ideas circulated freely. The church offered an ideological and practical alternative to Marxist-led labor organizations attracting workers unwilling to join the communists. Urbanization and the growth of food-processing and light-manufacturing plants expanded the size and political potential of the urban working class. The communist-led confederation found themselves subject to the same forces of polarization. The Figueres government destroyed the remnants of the wartime coalition. The initial investigation of the country's labor movement revealed the extent to which it was oriented towards achieving legislative and juridical change. The demographic analysis of the work force relies on the population censuses of 1927 and 1950, the agricultural census of 1950, and the commercial/industrial census of 1951.
