Social welfare coverage of workers in rural Spain during the Franco dictatorship

The social welfare system developed by the Franco regime responded to a series of socio-political objectives that in the long term led to a complex and confusing social security system at the end of the dictatorship. During the early years of Francoism, the rural population derived little benefit from the new social insurances introduced by the regime, and finally a special scheme for agricultural workers was established with the aim of combining the regime's ideological goals: the elimination of class struggles through vertical trade unionism, the protection of agricultural employers' interests, control of protest movements in the countryside and safeguarding the traditional figure of the farmer. To do so, institutions created or assimilated by the regime, such as the Hermandades Sindicales de Labradores y Ganaderos and the Chambers of Agriculture, were used to control and manage the lists of beneficiaries of the first social insurances to cover the rural population: family and old-age allowances. The compulsory sickness benefit was not extended to rural areas until 1958, coinciding with the genesis of the institutions that were to manage the special scheme. That year the National Agricultural Security Service was created within the Directorate General for Insurance, and a year later the National Mutual Society for Agricultural Insurance was launched. The aim of the paper is to examine the difficulties in introducing and managing the various social insurances, especially health insurance, and analyse coverage figures and financing.