Hacia una nueva cuestión meridionalcrisis de reconocimiento y heridas morales en las clases populares de la Vega Alta del río Segura (Región de Murcia)

Laburpena

Research always starts with a question. In our case, we questioned how labour was organised in a specific area of Southern Europe. Our main objective was to try to recognise how the social and moral logics of the social organisation of labour have been historically structured and represented in the region of Vega Alta. Additionally, to understand how the recession, that started in 2008, was weakening the moral agreements existing amongst social classes, and how it affected the working classes. For this research, we contemplated mainly qualitative research methods. The main research technique involved conducting scripted in-depth interviews. Furthermore, I carried out an ethnographic immersion during several weeks, as well as various immersions and everyday life observations on countless occasions. The researched area is Vega Alta del Segura in the Region of Murcia, Spain. This eminently agriculturally productive enclave has historically had very weak industrial development. Vega Alta is a prototypic area of Southern Europe, where the working classes have become ultra-flexible working figures, i.e. a working class that is able to mobilise (both concerning sector and territory) to try to be employed in any labour niche available, mainly in the agricultural and building sectors, hotel and catering industry, and small retailers. My thesis defends that the historic Southern issue of underdevelopment and inequality between Northern and Southern Europe has transformed over the years, becoming an issue that concerns the manner in which the development model inserts subordinate working classes. In the current context of neoliberal globalisation, the South is certainly integrated in the processes of valorisation of capital. However, this South is generated as the periphery of the European developmentalist project and its developmentalist insertion is conducted from the inequality and the fragmented polarisation, which are continuist features between the "old" and the "new" Southern issue. In the Spanish south-east, the working classes have been generated as flexible working figures. Their labour integration is linked to the local and regional production model, but it is also linked to a whole series of moral standards and ways of understanding life that have been constructed and cemented over the years. The most subjective aspects intertwine with the objectives to produce ways of life and of labour organisation, which are resolved in society. For decades, the specific relationships between power, labour and moral economy that have been deployed in Vega Alta have remained, in relative terms, stable. In my research I demonstrate how since the recession that started in 2008, the first signs of change in the traditional labour relationships and the social organisation of labour could be sensed. These restructures affect the opportunities of social labour integration and the social reproduction of the working class in Vega Alta del Segura. These uncertainties lead the most vulnerable people to feel less valued socially and for their work than in the recent past. This causes the creation of moral injuries and, consequently, the social consensus that used to favour the reproduction of the system without social fragmentation, is weakened. The thesis is subdivided into four main sections that contain ten chapters. The first three chapters are devoted to the introduction and the theoretical and methodological framework of the thesis. In the first section I analyse the specificity of the developmentalist model in Southern Europe and I introduce the region researched. In the second section I examine the production model and the working times of Vega Alta. The third section is allocated to the strategies of social reproduction and moral economy. In the last section the consequences of the recession as moral injuries are determined.