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Taking the Measure of Labor: Rural Rationalization in Twentieth-Century Brazil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2014
Abstract
Rural sugarcane workers in the Brazilian Northeast negotiated with planters in 1963 to establish guidelines for measuring jobs, producing a document they called the Task Table. This article situates the Table in historical context, placing it in a long-term process of agricultural rationalization that generated struggles over flexibility, control, and freedom on the job. The Table emerged at one moment in these battles and since conflicts like these over productivity, efficiency, and control are common to industrial and agricultural work alike, analyzing the Table offers insight into a broad struggle between workers and employers over the conditions and regulation of labor. For a region of hundreds of thousands of sugarcane workers, the Task Table reflected and facilitated the transformation of labor relationships, views of the working environment, and worker consciousness.
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- Environment and Labor
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- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014
References
NOTES
I give warm thanks to the participants in the 2011 Toronto Brazilian History Workshop, my colleagues Elena Conis, Julia Bullock, and AnaPatricia Garcia, and the two ILWCH reviewers for thoughtful and constructive feedback.
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49. In a dialogue with Scott's ideas, Michael Ervin argues that subject populations actually desire some of the products that come from these Scottian tools of quantification and measurement. In the specific case of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, he describes the double-edged quality of statistics and maps, which could both help and constrain popular groups. Ervin, Michael A., “Statistics, Maps, and Legibility: Negotiating Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” The Americas 66 (2009): 156Google Scholar.
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75. “Relatório No 01/76, Recife, 9 fevereiro de 1976,” in SSP 31,496: FETAPE VII, APE. FETAPE president Almeida do Nascimento only gave numbers for the country as a whole. At that scale, temporary workers outnumber contracted workers by 6,800,000 to 1,200,000.
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79. March 17, 1977, hearing in Processo 49/77: Severina Rosa da Conceição e outras (4) vs. Engenho Boa Vista (BA), JCJ-Nazaré da Mata, A-TRT.
80. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 19.
81. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos, interview.
82. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 58.
83. “Exmo. Sr. Ministro do Trabalho e da Previdência Social.”
84. July 13 Judgment in TRT Processo 567/77, A-TRT.
85. July 13 Judgment in TRT Processo 567/77, A-TRT.
86. April 26, 1977, hearing, in TRT Processo 567/77.
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88. Irací, interview with the author, tape recording, Vicência, March 7 and March 27. Irací was secretary of the rural union of Vicência, an elected position.
89. Gerson Quirino Bastos, interview with the author, handwritten notes, Recife, March 25, 2003.
90. Koury, Movimentos sociais, 21.
91. This is an argument of Biorn Maybury-Lewis captured in his book title, The Politics of the Possible.
92. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos, interview with the author, tape recording, Murupé, March 27, 2003.