This was the next logical step after such a necessity was presented in WWII. Meanwhile, the capitalist economy needed to prove itself in a world in which communism was a real threat to the U. Secondary improvements associated with Operation Bootstrap were increased infrastructure for P.
In the late 40s industrialization of P. The easiest way to do this was through tax breaks. With large tax breaks for corporations, industry flooded into P. The island underwent rapid development. This rapid development is sometimes cited as the reason Operation Bootstrap constitutes a high modernist failure. This oversight causes P. This lack of job infastructure cause rapid migration to the United States in which caused a displacement of P.
Operation Bootstrap primarily relates to the economic implications of the Twentieth century on P. Nationalists were not regarded as a real movement in the same context as industrialization.
This piece of legislation, introduced by protectionist beet farmers in the US in an attempt to prevent competition from the colonial sugar industry, was part of wider legislation which also attempted to prevent the development of the sugar industry in the Philippines through the limitation of corporate land ownership there to 1, acres. The law was never applied in Puerto Rico or the Philippines. The revival of the acre law by the Popular Democratic Party did not significantly reduce sugar output in Puerto Rico.
Sugar production peaked in the early s and then remained stable throughout the decade. A study of the decline of the sugar industry of Puerto Rico characterized the agrarian reform of the Populares as "nothing more than a 'real estate' transaction between the government and the sugar interests. There are currently over , acres in open violation of this law.
There was no sudden collapse of the sugar industry in Puerto Rico. Throughout the s, sugar production in Puerto Rico hovered around the yearly figure of one million tons.
However, employment in the sugar industry declined much faster that total sugar output, suggesting an increase in productivity during the decade.
New varieties of cane increased agricultural yields, particularly in the lands operated by large corporations such as the Aguirre Sugar Company. Productivity in the sugar industry increased from a level of Between and , the sugar industry laid off 42, workers. In the sugar industry produced 70 percent as much sugar as in , with 40 percent as many workers.
The sugar mills, which had been the main representatives of modern industry employing 20, workers in , employed 13, in and only 8, in Most of the employment in the sugar industry was generated by the agricultural phase of the process, which was difficult to mechanize.
The cutting of sugar cane was done by field workers with a machete, essentially with the same technology of the 19th century. In Puerto Rico there was no mechanization of the cutting phase in the s.
What seems to have made the difference in the s was the mechanization of the process of lifting the sugar cane into trucks once it was cut. Simple field cranes replaced labor in loading the cane into the trucks.
By , almost percent of the cane was completely loaded by machinery. Smaller mills began to shut down operations while some of the larger mills actually increased their share of sugar production.
The giants of the industry, which were established in the first decade after the US occupation of the island and which controlled much of the wealth of the insular economy for decades, finally collapsed in the late s and eighties. Central Fajardo of the Fajardo Sugar Company closed down in Central Aguirre, whose yearly dividends of 30 percent to its owners earned it the title of "Drake's Treasure" in the s, closed down in By the late s and s the sugar industry of Puerto Rico was in a profound state of decline.
Headlines in the local press of the island pointed to the unprofitability of the industry and the obsolescence of the industrial equipment. The home needle industry in Puerto Rico developed after as a result of the closure of traditional US sources of supply of embroidered cloth and drawn linen.
France, Belgium and Japan, the traditional providers, became inaccessible during and after the First World War due to the German blockade, high tariffs, and virtual embargoes. Garments were manufactured in large factories, in smaller establishment called sweatshops , and in the homes of the workers who received already cut consignments of cloth and materials. There had been some development of the garment industry for export to the US market between and , but the big expansion of employment in that industry in Puerto Rico happened after In , after 40, workers from different branches of the garment industry went on strike in New York, the Department of Education in Puerto Rico introduced needlework classes into its school curriculum.
Between and , 26, women were trained through the public education system in Puerto Rico to provide an abundant and skilled labor force for this industry. The development of the garment industry is intimately intertwined with the development of the two other principal export crops of the Island, sugar and tobacco.
Garment production took advantage of the transportation infrastructure, such as trains, trucks, and ships, introduced originally to service the sugar industry. Employment in the home needlework industry was a means of household survival during the off-season when the majority of male workers were unemployed. During the months of August, September and October, payrolls in the sugar industry shrank to half their harvest time size January to July. In November, the sugar industry employed only a third as many workers as during the harvest, so that two thirds of the workers and small cane growers were idle.
It could exist only on desperation wages. No one could make a living at it; but a woman whose husband is unemployed and whose children are starving will go to great lengths for the price of a few pounds of rice.
There were some rather large workshops in Puerto Rico. By there were garment shops with approximate average employment of 40 workers each. As the sugar industry advanced, and generalized the problem of seasonal unemployment, garment production also advanced.
Because most of the workers were women, wages in the industry were considered "supplementary" to those of the household males, allowing the jobbers to pay very low wages. However, these large shops paid better wages than home production, and allowed the workers congregated at the production site to organize, in contrast to the dispersed household producers who dealt individually with the jobbers. The poorer paid household producers were responsible for the bulk of the output of the needlework industry.
Home workers were much more numerous than the workers in the sweatshops. Ninety percent of garment production took place in the homes of the workers, in the classical pattern of "putting-out" or "cottage" industries. The number of employees in the official figures are probably an underestimation.
In many homes, women worked and were assisted by their children, and in times of economic duress, adult males also worked in cottage production, but the figures for wage employment in the cottage industry register only the transactions between the women and the intermediaries who delivered the materials and picked up the finished product.. According to a Report of the Women's Bureau of the US Department of Labor, more than 40, families were employed in the domestic needlework industry in Puerto Rico in In the mids, the U.
It was during this time that the federal government, in conjunction with Governor Luis Munoz Marin, pushed for the industrialization and development of the island of Puerto Rico. Farming had been the primary economic venture in Puerto Rico for decades, but agriculture was no longer sustaining the island. Governor Marin, with the help of the U. One of the movements of Operation Bootstrap occurred in May of , when the first Industrial Incentives Act eliminated the Puerto Rican corporate tax.
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