All citizens who could perform labor were required to do so for a set number of days out of a year (the basic meaning of the word mit'a is a regular turn or a season).
The Inca Empire's wealth meant a family often needed only 65 days to farm; the rest of the year was devoted entirely to the mit'a.
[3] A relative of mit'a (federal work) is the modern Quechua system of Minka or faena, which is mostly applied in small-scale villages.
In this instance, wak'as and paqarinas became significant centers of shared worship and a point of unification of their ethnically and linguistically diverse empire, bringing unity and citizenship to often geographically disparate peoples.
During viceregal times, the Andean method of distributing labor obligations among the ethnic groups was preserved, which permitted the continued maintenance of these public works.
All labor in the Andean world was performed as a rotational service, whether for maintaining the tampus, roads, bridges or for guarding the storehouses or other such tasks.
In the señorio of Chincha, the fishermen numbered ten thousand, and went to sea in turns, the rest of the time enjoying themselves by dancing and drinking.
Under the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, communities were required to provide one seventh of their male labor force at any given time for public works, mines and agriculture.
The Inca mit'a provided public goods, such as maintenance of road networks and sophisticated irrigation and cropping systems that required intercommunity coordination of labor.
[8] The majority of Inca subjects performed their mit'a obligations in or near their home communities, often in agriculture; service in mines was extremely rare.
[10] A 2021 study in the Journal of Economic History found that the colonial mita system in Peru caused the decimation of the male native-born population.
[11] The Spanish conquistadors also used the same labor system to supply the workforce they needed for the silver mines, which was the basis of their economy in the colonial period.
Toledo recognized that without a steady, reliable and inexpensive source of labor, mining would not be able to grow at the speed that the Spanish crown had requested.
At its peak, recruitment for the Potosi mit'a extended to an area that was nearly 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) and included much of southern Peru and present-day Bolivia.
The Spanish mit'a system had severe impacts on the native population, which was of able-bodied workers at a time while their communities were experiencing demographic collapse.
[16] The fact that farmers from mit'a districts do not have greater access to paved roads means that they are unable to transport crops to larger, regional markets.
In the case of Peru, throughout the 1980s, Shining Path, as part of their Maoist ideology, attempted to turn farmers away from commercial farming; their efforts were largely unpopular and met with resistance.
Without haciendas to compete with the more exploitative Spanish system, mita districts were subjected to greater economic and health pressures from their labor.
After a few months in Peru, the commission returned to South Korea and rolled out their own modern version of the Incan mit'a to Korean production systems, including the manufacturing industry.