1 - The occupational and class structure of the male population of the city of Buenos Aires by nationality, 1914

Summary

The third national census of 1914 contains sufficiently detailed data on occupation and nationality to make possible a number of generalisations on the social and class structure of the city's male population in 1914. There are two principal difficulties which ought to be borne in mind in these calculations. The first is that the census is frequently unreliable. For example, in the listed occupations for the province of Buenos Aires, there appear exactly 500,000 persons described as occupationally ‘unspecified’. The problem does not occur on this scale in the federal capital, though there are undoubtedly some errors. The second difficulty is that the census provides no indication of the class position of each person within each occupation. This has to be done by a process of elimination, and on occasion by rather crude estimates. The principal difficulty lies in estimating the size of white-collar groups. For the industrial sector, which was on average very low-capitalised, the proportion of white-collar workers has been estimated at 15%. For the more highly capitalised transport sector, it has been estimated at 20%. Both these figures may be rather high.

At a glance the employed male population of Buenos Aires falls into six groups. At the top of the social scale were the rentier groups, formed mainly of urban or absentee landlords and their dependants. Next were the professional classes, civil servants, officers of the armed forces, lawyers, doctors, educators, writers and artists.