Une durée de travail souvent excessive en agriculture

There is in the whole society a strong pressure to reduce the working time. But, in agriculture, at least in the sector of animal productions, the time spent in working often remains considerable and the holidays rare or short. That is especially true for the farm's heads, for many livestock producers, together with their wifes, who are still working every day of the year. It is also true for some wageearners, the interindividual variability being in any case important. No doubt, the working time is difficult to measure in agriculture, and the available data are incomplete and debatable ; however these data tend to sustain assumption of frequent persistence of a long, too long, working time, while the agricultural work is becoming less and less slow or porous. Historically, it appears strange that such living conditions are still accepted in the little farms peasantry and in a part of middle-size modernized farms ; people work much and earn little. Would it not be a survival of ethics based towards toil and effort ? In the case of dairy farms, the reasons are multiple and variable according to the individuals. But the principal explanation, it seems, is that livestock producers still suffer from economic domination.