The State of the Nation researchers have come up with a startling figure from a recent poll, especially significant this time of the year:

One in five Costa Rican workers do not receive a Christmas bonus (aguinaldo) and one-third lack such guarantees as sick pay, paid vacations, and workplace accident insurance.

This is shocking for a nation whose laws appear to outsiders to benefit its workers. Indeed, many private employers are obviously thumbing their noses at the law.

The data was obtained during the 2011 survey of homes. The pollsters are still sifting through the mass of data obtained in that survey.

The worst offenders are, as one might assume, in rural, sparsely populated areas where agricultural companies and individual farmers are not so likely to be caught by the Labor Ministry.

While Labor Minister Sandra Piszk believes that the poll is accurate, she believes it does not take into account improvements from 2010 when she took office.

The question may be asked, why do workers in Guanacaste and the far southern Costa Rican zone stand for such abuses from their employers when they know they are not getting their legal benefits?

The answer is easy: rural Labor Ministry inspectors are less likely to probe into working conditions and they are less accessible to workers. Also, they are more apt to be unskilled and living in an area with limited employment opportunities in case a complaint to inspectors should get them fired.

Also, a cultural factor may be at play here — rural workers are more apt to be traditionalists than urban workers. This means they are more conformist or apathetic and less likely to stand up for their rights.

They view such complaints as mere troublemaking. They want, in short, to be liked by their peers and will swallow their feelings. Law-breaking employers, on the other hand, think of workers, especially manual laborers, more like machines or livestock than people.

Piszk, in a press release Tuesday night, maintains that benefits have improved in service jobs such as retail sales, hotels, restaurants and repair shops. It is true that these are areas likely to receive visits from labor inspectors.

University of Costa Rica labor researcher Juan Diego Trejos does not dispute this and feels that the most abuses tend to be in tiny businesses hanging on by their fingernails where too much pressure to undertake extra expenses of legal benefits could sink the business.

State of the Nation researchers consider workers under 20 years old and more than 55 to be most vulnerable to having their rights violated. This also illustrates how vulnerable their employment situation is.

Commentary: Lest one feel that this reporter is over-emphasizing the rural conformity factor, this reporter, then living in Guanacaste province, stopped in a sugar refining town in central Costa Rica.

Most of the townspeople were dependent on the sugar refinery there, it chimney spewing out a heavy smoke created by burning the was sugar cane stalks after they had been squeezed dry.

When we mentioned that the living conditions there were insupportable (barely suppressing a cough in the turgid smoky air) a red-eyed cane cutter responded philosophically, “we have to put up with it — it’s our employment.”