Ferreira de Castro: a lã, a Covilhã e a política laboral do Estado Novo

In 1947 Ferreira de Castro publishes The wool and the snow, a novel that tells the life of Horacio, a bucolic sheepherder who chooses to be a weaver in an industrial city; in this novel, the author frames Covilhã as a utopian city based upon harmonious relations between employers and employees in the wool industry, and both the characters and the narrator testify in loco that a more dignified life for the working class is already beginning under the practical effects of two laws promulgated by the Estado Novo in the 1930s: the National Labour Statute and the Collective Labour Agreement. Ferreira de Castro describes the exemplary way all wool mills enforce the new employment standard laws covering issues in work and rest hours, ages of admission, hygiene and safety, career advancement, protection of female workers, housing affordability, unemployment and incapacity. In a country town, an industrial utopia emerges as an alternative model to the pandemonium of a post-war hopeless Europe: the factory work was increasing, and wages were duly paid. There was order in a quiet nation, free of strikes and seditious Unions, much in line with the strategy outlined by António Ferro, mentor of Salazar’s fascist regime, for their tentacular propaganda machine.