ABSTRACT
The legislation was applied to a workforce that was changing. It was increasingly more literate, industrial, and politically coherent. Women were entering the labor market in unprecedented numbers. In the 1930s the Costa Rican labor force was predominately male and agricultural, and outside the coastal banana region, it was overwhelmingly Costa Rican. The Costa Rican composition of the labor force meant workers were citizens; they had access to, and, as prolabor legislation was enacted, protection under the country's political apparatus. The 1927 census did not differentiate between agricultural employers and employees. Foreign labor was concentrated in banana production in the Atlantic province of Limon, where blacks from Jamaica and Nicaraguans were heavily represented. The formalization of a dual wage structure accelerated the process of rural-urban migration, and fed a growing urban labor movement. Higher urban wages combined with a series of other factors to draw workers from rural areas toward provincial capitals.
