| Resumo: | The labor market of nineteenth-century Spain was largely unregulated. The first systematic regulation did not in fact take place until 1900, and the measures enacted were aimed at tackling the most serious issues: abuses in the employment of women and children, industrial accidents, and hours of work and rest. However, compliance with these early social reform measures was limited. The enforcement of labor market regulations was hampered by limited funding and opposition by a range of different social groups. In fact, factory inspection was based more on actions to raise awareness and persuasion than on penalties. Economic historians have shown that in contexts of limited state intervention, such as the British and American labor markets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the labor market wage compensated for undesirable urban and workplace features. This article shows that Spanish workers were wage compensated for the inefficiency of early social and labor reforms, a finding that tends to mitigate the pessimistic view of previous studies about working conditions in the early twentieth-century in Spain.
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