For at least the first half of the nineteenth century, black porters were key figures in the transport of people and freight in Rio de Janeiro. According to contemporary reports from travellers in Brazil, porters were responsible for providing various basic services in the carioca society of the time, including the transport of water, food, the sick and the dead, and the collection of waste, as well as for carrying out removals. They also played an important role in moving freight through the Customs House. Jean-Baptiste Debret, who lived in Rio de Janeiro between 1816 and 1831, reported that to transport coffee there was a porter for each sack, with a foreman motivating the workforce with songs.Footnote 1 As well as carrying freight on their shoulders and on their heads, when transporting large volumes of freight the porters would also use equipment such as wheelbarrows. However, the motive power provided for this equipment still came from human beings.
Foreigners were particularly struck by the use of blacks for transporting people and freight. Thomas Ewbank, who lived in Brazil from 1845 to 1846, said that “The whole business part of Rio is singularly well adapted for railways, and if the people determine to continue blacks as beasts of draught, it would be to their interest to have them.”Footnote 2
The widespread use of these porters was generally seen as a consequence of the fact that most of them were escravos ao ganho, i.e. wage-earning slaves who had to pay a fixed income to their owners at the end of the day or the week. Debret believed that the opposition to the introduction of new means of transport was directly connected to the importance of wage-earning slaves in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 3 To maintain the predominance of porterage was in the interest of the slave-owners as it meant an opportunity for economic return.
To understand the widespread use of slave labour in the Brazilian transport sector, it also helps to bear in mind the tradition of porters in Africa. In the main regions from which slaves were brought to Brazil – western Africa, central western Africa, and eastern Africa – porters played a fundamental part in enabling trade between villages and cities. Europeans who traded with Africans in the interior of the continent entered into contact with these porters regularly when transporting goods.Footnote 4 In Brazil, slave-owners were able to use to their own advantage a tradition that existed in Africa, by using their slaves as wage-earning porters.
As well as noting the significant economic benefits that the service provided by the porters generated for their owners, it should also be noted that this work highly suited these slaves, even though it had been forced on to them. According to Mary Karasch, the role of porter was the favourite role of the escravos ao ganho.Footnote 5 Travellers’ reports explain that this was because the activity allowed the slaves themselves to organize their collective labour. The members of the groups of porters, always with a leader chosen from amongst them, negotiated the tasks to be carried out and decided how large a team would be required, depending on the volume and weight of the goods.Footnote 6
On occasions, the porters would also unite to buy their freedom. According to the testimony provided by J.B. Moore, Chairman of the Brazilian Association of Liverpool, to the Select Committee on the Slave Trade, porters of coffee from the Mina ethnic group would advance money to buy the emancipation of a member, and would then be paid back in monthly instalments.Footnote 7 Charles Ribeyrolles, another traveller, claimed that members of this ethnic group in Rio de Janeiro constituted a corporation among themselves which put money aside to buy freedom and each year sent freed slaves back to Africa.Footnote 8 It should be noted here that although these urban slaves enjoyed a certain freedom of movement, as they often carried out their activities far removed from the direct control of their owners, one of the main reasons for the creation of the police in Rio de Janeiro as early as 1808 was precisely to monitor and control the city's slave population.Footnote 9
From Black Porters to The First Vehicles
Despite the major role played by black porters, mainly slaves, in the daily life of the city, there is also evidence of the existence of vehicles in Rio de Janeiro at this time.Footnote 10 A survey of applications for vehicle licences from the city authorities shows that 621 such licences were requested in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 11 In my research of the documentation, I found requests for licences for tilburies, luxury carriages, and four-wheeled carriages. However, the great majority of submissions for licences were for carts, which accounted for 83.89 per cent of the licences granted.
In many of the requests for licences made to the City Council, the uses of the carts concerned were indicated. These included the transport of firewood and furniture, the provision of removal services, and the delivery of agricultural produce to markets. A large proportion of the carts were used to provide basic urban services such as the delivery of barrels of water and the transport of waste water, basically sewage. There were also carts used to transport waste from individual residences to designated sites for disposal.
It is important to note here that the functions carried out by means of these carts were practically the same as those carried out by the black porters. However, the methods of transport were very different. The carts were pulled by animals, whereas the porters generally transported their goods on their shoulders or even on their heads. There was another major difference referring to the workforce behind the two modes of transport: while the porters were mainly slaves, with a minority of free men among them, the cart drivers were nearly all free men, many of them immigrants from Portugal.Footnote 12
The presence of these vehicles in the transport of freight and people in the first half of the nineteenth century provides us with evidence for the beginning of a process of segmentation and the establishment of a hierarchy in the transport sector, a process that was also developing on a wider scale in the general labour market in Rio de Janeiro. Slaves and free men, Brazilians and immigrants, shared working spaces every day – factories, shops, and streets – and often disputed work positions. Free men secured the best positions for themselves, and in the transport sector this meant that they represented the clear majority of the drivers of vehicles. Meanwhile, the manual transport of freight and people was carried out mainly by slaves, the black porters. This process of segmentation and increased hierarchy became more accentuated in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was a sharp rise in the number of vehicle licences awarded from 1851 to 1870, reaching a total of 2,477 licences. Free workers, including Portuguese immigrants, continued to represent the majority of the drivers of these vehicles. Carts assumed an even greater role in the transport of freight in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and in the daily life of the city.
The number of Portuguese in the transport sector is related, firstly, to the large number of immigrants who came from Portugal, which was already considerable in the first half of the century and grew further after 1850. The Portuguese comprised about 10 per cent of the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro in 1849, a figure that reached 20 per cent of the total population in 1872, making up 66 per cent of foreigners.Footnote 13 Secondly, the strong presence of Portuguese immigrants among transport workers can be related to the fact that they already had contact with the same vehicles in their homeland.Footnote 14 In the Rio de Janeiro context, driving vehicles was one way that these Portuguese immigrants found to differentiate themselves from slave workers, with which the figure of the black porter was commonly associated. For those who came with some savings, or who acquired them in Brazil, the low initial cost of buying a cart and animals meant that the transport sector was an attractive option for “immigrants who came here and had little money to start a small business”.Footnote 15
Although carts had taken over much of the activities previously performed by porters, the porters had by no means disappeared. For part of the second half of the century, cart drivers and porters would continue to coexist. According to Karasch, the porters protested when tradespeople began to replace them by horses and carts, depriving them of the income opportunities mentioned above.Footnote 16 As the records show, the introduction of new means of transport was generally not an automatic or natural process. On the contrary, it led to competition, disputes, and open conflict between the workers. Over the course of the second half of the century, the black porters would witness how their operations were gradually restricted to the transport of freight within the port area. Moreover, although they continued to form the major part of the workforce in the port, they also had to face increasing competition from free workers, many of whom, again, were Portuguese immigrants.Footnote 17
In May 1872, a group of black porters who worked at Praça das Marinhas and were escravos ao ganho demanded a pay rise from the service contractors. These contractors called on white workers, probably Portuguese, who agreed to provide the service for a lower price. However, the group of black porters got together and physically abused the white workers, throwing some of them in the water.Footnote 18 This case is but one example of how free and unfree work was closely connected in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. The fact that escravos ao ganho were paid, as Marcel van der Linden has noted, shows that the boundaries between concepts such as “slavery” and “wage labour” could be extremely confusing. Further, “the wage laborers are often less ‘free’ than the classic view suggests”.Footnote 19 In this sense, as Alessandro Stanziani has shown, for the majority of European countries between the sixteenth and the end of the nineteenth century “the barrier between freedom and bondage was not only moveable and negotiable, it [was] also thought of differently from how we are used to thinking of it today”. This author noted that “labour was submitted to serious legal constraints, usually justified by reference to the ‘debt’ or the ‘deed’ the worker, or the peasant, had contracted with both master and community”.Footnote 20
In the case of Brazil in the nineteenth century, things were not very different, and it was possible to find former slaves who had signed service contracts promising to repay through years of work the loan of a certain amount which had usually been used to buy their own manumission. Although they were no longer slaves, they promised to serve their employer with obedience.Footnote 21 However, it was not only former slaves who were subjected to such situations. Many Portuguese came to Brazil as engajados, a condition similar to that of the indentured servants who arrived in the eighteenth century in the West Indies and North America.Footnote 22 In return for the costs of transport by sea, the engajados were charged twice the regular fare. They could land in Brazil only with the permission of the boats’ captains. In Brazilian ports genuine auctions of men and women took place, very similar to the auctions of African slaves. Local recruiters paid the ticket and those who desired to contract the services of immigrants were charged a higher sum then paid by the recruiters.Footnote 23 Then, a service contract was drawn up which subjected the engajados to payments lower than those received by other workers, such as the amount paid to rent a slave. It was possible to find in the newspapers advertisements concerning engajados who had run away from their place of work before the end of the contract period, very similar to the runaway slave advertisements.Footnote 24
The changes that took place in the transport sector in Rio de Janeiro, which went from being a city in which freight was carried by black porters to one in which carts predominated and then to a city of trams, have often been seen as a consequence of urban growth. For example, according to Ana Maria da Silva Moura, the increase in the city's population and production from 1849 to 1856 led to a larger market for the carts and also to a greater need to distribute both imported and domestically produced goods.Footnote 25 However, this process of transformation cannot be reduced to a direct equation between population growth and the growth in the number of carts without taking into account several other key variables that were at work at this time. Although the demographic data for Rio are problematic, they do show that the city's total population grew only slightly between 1849 and 1872, from 266,466 inhabitants to 274,972, a growth of just over 3 per cent. In the same period, the number of vehicles increased by almost 300 per cent. Clearly, population growth by itself cannot explain this increase.
The main difference between the census of 1849 and that of 1872 was in the number of slaves, which fell dramatically in the capital in this period. From representing 41.5 per cent of the city's total population in 1849, when Rio de Janeiro had the largest population of slaves of any city in the Americas, by 1872 the slave population had fallen to just 17.8 per cent of the inhabitants.Footnote 26 According to Karasch, the reasons for this decrease included high mortality rates in the early 1850s and an increase in the price of slaves (because of the prohibition of the slave trade in 1850 and the demand for labour from coffee plantations), both of which led many slave-owners either to rent or sell their slaves to rural areas.Footnote 27
The opposition to the introduction of other means of transport came mainly from the slave-owners, who were concerned by the impact on the economic opportunities of their wage-earning slaves who were working as porters. The relative decline in the slave population surely contributed towards rendering this kind of opposition obsolete.
1850 is also considered to have been a watershed year for the Brazilian economy in general. The end of slave trading in that year released capital that had previously been employed in this activity. This enabled an “increase in the liquidity of the economy, a diversification of investments, and the start of financial activities to be deployed in the service sector and the nascent industrial sector”.Footnote 28 If before 1850 Brazil had barely responded to the rise of international capitalism, Maria Bárbara Levy has shown that following that year the country was able to draw up its own legal framework for a company law, enabling the establishment of the sociedade anônima or the limited liability company.Footnote 29 The freight and passenger transport companies that sprung up after 1850 were hence clearly related to this process of the wider transformation of the Brazilian economy, which supported the establishment of new forms of companies.
Several companies were established specifically in the freight transport sector, which promised very high profits. The importance of this sector is related to some of the basic characteristics of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, when it was both the capital of the country and the main port for exporting coffee, the most important product of the Brazilian economy.Footnote 30 As a result, the port of Rio de Janeiro generated enormous demand for freight transport services.
Commercial and industrial facilities also began to develop their own fleets of vehicles and to hire workers to drive them. Many advertisements for drivers can be found in newspapers of the time, such as that placed by a timber warehouse in Rua da Saúde, which in 1873 advertised for a driver and offered to “pay a good wage”.Footnote 31 Carts and their drivers had a presence in almost all the city's businesses, from breweries such as Brahma to laundries, textile companies, mills, factories for soap and sails, brickmakers, and others.Footnote 32 Cart drivers were responsible for transporting nearly all the goods produced and sold within the city.
In the area of passenger transport, since the beginning of the nineteenth century the city had been home to establishments that rented out carriages and chaises. In 1859, donkey-drawn trams were introduced in Rio de Janeiro, which was the first city in South America to have this type of transport. By the end of the century, there were four main companies in Rio de Janeiro providing tram transport on rails: Companhia Jardim Botânico, in the southern zone of the city; Companhia Carris Urbanos, in the centre; and Companhia Vila Isabel and Companhia de Carris da Tijuca, both in the north.
In this period, the tram became the main means of transport for passengers in Rio de Janeiro. From 1870 to 1905, the number of users increased by over 1,680 per cent, rising to more than 100 million passengers in 1905. The number of passengers using the trams was significantly higher than the number of passengers for other forms of transport. For example, from 1886 to 1896 the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil, a railway company which connected the centre of the city with the suburbs, transported 30 million people in total, while in 1896 alone the number of tram passengers reached almost 73 million people.
WORK AND DISCIPLINE IN THE TRAM COMPANIES
As we have discussed, the establishment of the first tram companies was closely associated with the economic transformations taking place in Brazil. But what did the creation of these companies mean for the workers involved, and what was it like to work for them? There was a clear division of labour at the tram companies: the coachmen were responsible for driving the trams, while the conductors collected the fares. As the conductors received part of the companies’ earnings, the transport companies created a network to monitor their employees. There was constant suspicion on the part of employers that the conductors were pocketing the fares. For example, the Gazeta de Notícias, a newspaper of general circulation, of 27 August 1898 stated that employees who stole these sums were disloyal as the fares represented “remuneration for the work and for the capital of the company”, and were also the source of investment in improving the tram service.Footnote 33
The companies were also worried that they were losing money because of conductors not collecting the fares in all cases. An employee of Jardim Botânico received a letter of dismissal from the company's chairman telling him that he had already been warned that he was taking too many non-paying passengers and, as the company could not carry all these people for free, that the employee had become “too expensive for the Company as a conductor”.Footnote 34 The letter illustrates how the company tried to control the revenues from the vehicles. It also demonstrates that despite the company's best efforts to monitor the service the workers had found ways to avoid these controls and to take passengers without collecting fares.
The monitoring of the conductors was carried out by inspectors, who were the companies’ eyes on the ground. On 1 August 1903, the workers’ journal A greve argued that the employees of the transport companies were being victimized by capitalism, and “persecuted by these vandals and exploiters of their sweat”. The newspaper said that the inspections formed a key part of the policy of the company owners, and that the inspectors were robbing the conductors of their daily bread in order to earn the good graces of the bosses.Footnote 35 In 1898, the generalized suspicion against conductors and the concern of the transport companies to maximize their profits led one transport company, Companhia Carris Urbanos, to install a system in its trams designed to ensure that fares were paid correctly. The system was based on calculating the average passenger traffic of a particular line. If this level was not reached, conductors were obliged to make up the difference from their wages.Footnote 36
Over time, the monitoring of conductors and of transport workers in general intensified and company owners introduced secret inspections. These took place when there were suspicions about a particular employee. To catch the suspect in the act, the inspections were carried out by unidentified inspectors who were not known to the employees. However, the employees were given no right of defence and were only alerted when they received letters fining them or dismissing them from the company.Footnote 37 Relations between inspectors and conductors were tense, as the former had the power to reduce the salaries of the conductors by recording any misdemeanours and even to have them dismissed. According to A greve, in its 1 August 1903 edition, the inspectors’ director of the Companhia Jardim Botânico required conductors, through his assistants, to provide him with valuable gifts, such as cases of port wine, and threatened conductors who refused with dismissal.Footnote 38
Coachmen had to comply with schedules of working hours and shifts. The inspectors were responsible for verifying the coachmen's compliance with the working hours established by the employers. The coachmen worked in shifts, with the first shift starting at 3.30 in the morning. The workers’ journal Gazeta Operária, in its edition of 8 February 1903, said that employees of the tram companies had wages that were “negligible considering they worked twelve, fourteen, or even more hours per day”.Footnote 39 By way of comparison, in Berlin in 1902 coachmen and conductors generally worked eleven hours a day, and a maximum of twelve hours.Footnote 40 A manifesto from the coachmen of Lisbon, dated 1910, says that “by day they work from seven in the morning to seven at night, and by night from eight until the morning, in the cold and the rain”.Footnote 41 Average working hours for employees of tram companies in Rio de Janeiro were generally the same as in other cities around the world, although they could be extended. Coachmen and cart drivers who worked for other transport companies outside the tram sector might work even longer hours. In 1906, the working day in the transport sector was “fourteen, sixteen, or more hours per day, beginning in the morning and going on until late at night”. In December that year, transport workers went on strike, demanding a working day of twelve hours.Footnote 42
The companies imposed a range of regulations on their employees. These established the respective punishments that could be inflicted, including fines, suspension, and dismissal. These rules were mandated by the employers, who were also responsible for ruling on each case. According to Carlos da Fonseca, such fines have to be regarded, in general, as “the everyday expression of employer justice, and a sort of purgatory of small offences”.Footnote 43 These regulations were common not only in transport companies in Rio de Janeiro but also in other countries, including Portugal. By the end of the nineteenth century such regulations had become common practice in different types of Brazilian companies. According to Robério Santos Souza, company regulations “were established as an increasingly wide-reaching set of rules and norms, which covered areas ranging from moral teaching for employees to information about wages, fines, suspensions, and the management of conflicts”.Footnote 44 Company regulations also constituted disciplinary mechanisms in which employers established their expectations for the performance and behaviour of their workforce.
From 1903 the rules of the Companhia Jardim Botânico required conductors and tram drivers to buy uniforms from a related company. The journal A greve said that at this company each uniform cost 50,000 réis “from a very ordinary factory”, “while other companies” provided them to their employees for just 37,000 réis.Footnote 45 Complaints about companies forcing their employees to benefit related parties can also be found in letters from the coachmen of Companhia São Christovão to the journal A Reforma in 1873. According to the coachmen, company management required employees to use a metal badge on their caps. Although the coachmen had repeatedly called for this to be “replaced by any other form of emblem, the management paid no attention, perhaps because they were afraid of damaging the interests of the metal manufacturer, which are looked after by a well-known director at the company”.Footnote 46 We should also note that one of the reasons for the workers’ rejection of the metal might have been that metal insignia were used by wage-earning slaves. Most employees of the tram companies were free men, and in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the nineteenth century their refusal to use the metal could well have been connected with their unwillingness to be identified with slave workers. The coachmen of São Christovão also complained that company employees had to pay 1,000 réis a month to a doctor, although most of them already had doctors and mutual societies for medical treatment. The workers warned that if their demands were not met, the company would end up with no employees, as many of them were determined to leave the firm.Footnote 47
The obligation on workers to buy their uniforms and badges from specific providers, or to pay for a medical service they did not want, suggests that relations between employers and employees were not limited only to the simple remuneration of their labour. Marcel van der Linden argues that ties were possible “between both parties outside the circulation process”, and that the employers had ways of binding their employees to them.Footnote 48 As mentioned before, wage labour was often less “free” than has been assumed.
It can be seen from this survey that the hours worked by employees and their earnings were subject to intense controls by the transport companies, and that strategies for these controls evolved over time. In addition, systems for fines, suspensions, and dismissals aimed to punish employees and to establish rules and hierarchies, as well as to maximize exploitation of the workers.
CONFLICTS AND THE REGULATION OF THE TRANSPORT WORK
In addition to the inspection practices at the companies themselves, which became more sophisticated over time, transport workers were also governed by an extensive system of laws and rules designed to control them. This was related to some of the inherent characteristics of the profession: coachmen and conductors worked far from the eyes of their employer, they were much more mobile than any other group of industrial workers, and they had direct and daily contact with the population.Footnote 49 Another important point is that, despite the importance of companies in the transport sector, there were still self-employed workers engaged in transporting people and freight, such as waste. In this sense, the laws and regulations also aimed to control workers who were not subject to company rules and punishments.
In 1853, the City Council of Rio de Janeiro passed the first specific laws aimed at the drivers of vehicles. These laws required all coachmen to register with the police and to take an examination to prove their vehicle-driving skills. Later, in December 1872, the City Council signed a contract with Nunes de Souza & Cia, according to which the company would collect waste from residences, replacing around 120 cart drivers who had provided this service independently. Over the course of 1873, this contract became highly controversial, with opposition to it led by Luiz Fortunato Filho, the lawyer representing those workers who had provided the service before the contract was announced. In various letters to newspapers and in submissions to the relevant authorities, he alleged that the company would have, in fact, a monopoly over the service, in breach both of the freedom of trade and the freedom of the residents themselves to choose people that they trusted to provide the service.Footnote 50
As a way of making their decisions effective, the local authorities then halted the provision of licences to the waste collectors and seized the vehicles of those cart drivers who continued to work. Faced with the quantities of waste piling up in the streets – partly because the licensed company could not cope with demand and partly because some residents refused to use the company's services – the city authorities subsequently decided to hand out licences to the cart drivers again. The cart drivers then refused to go back to work, on the grounds that the licences were conditional and could be withdrawn at any time. A strike was organized with the aim of forcing the authorities to guarantee them their right to work.Footnote 51 The Ministry of Business of the Brazilian Empire then issued a ruling indicating that, as the company did not have the materials necessary to carry out the contract, the licences to the cart drivers should be maintained.Footnote 52 The cart drivers decided to return to work.
Ultimately, the company could not comply with the terms of the contract, and the cart drivers continued with their trade. However, in 1875 the city authorities approved a series of rules for carts which collected waste from the city's streets and houses to tighten controls on the workers involved. These rules included establishing sites where the cart drivers could dispose of the waste and the model of cart that could be used; they also stated that the service could be carried out “only until 9 o'clock in the morning, in the months of October to March, and until 10 o'clock, from April to September”. The penalty for breaking any of these rules was a fine of 30,000 réis and “eight days in prison, to be doubled for repeat offenders”.Footnote 53
In February 1876 the authorities also published a decree that required rigorous compliance with the times it had stipulated for collecting waste. The workers considered this attitude and the fines to be excessively harsh, and also noted that their carts could be confiscated and impounded without there apparently being any legal basis for this. These grievances, combined with the decision to restrict the waste collection service to the morning, resulted in a second strike by the cart drivers. Luiz Fortunato Filho argued that the right to work was at stake in this new dispute. The cart drivers who carried out waste collection services were mainly self-employed workers, and the press emphasized this fact in their support of the workers. The Gazeta de Notícias of 15 February 1876 asked:
Does the City Council have any contract with the cart drivers who collect the waste from individual residences? Does it provide them with any guarantees? No, it forces them to pay for a licence […] with taxes, fines, prison, and the pound. How can it expect to impose laws on free men, who have to be able to work if they want? How can it impose a duty on those workers to whom it gives no rights?Footnote 54
For the workers, the service they provided would not have been advantageous under the conditions imposed by the City Council. The workers said that they were not responsible for ensuring the health and hygiene of the city and that they worked to earn their daily bread: “[I]f they want us to continue to work as we have in the past, we will: if not, we will not return to work.”Footnote 55 The strike was reported widely in the press, as the waste left uncollected at residences was associated with concerns over the rising number of deaths from yellow fever. At this time, the waste accumulation was considered one of the causes of the outbreaks of yellow fever in 1873 and 1876, which claimed 3,659 and 3,476 lives respectively.Footnote 56 In both years, the workers responsible for waste collection had considerable bargaining power.
The clear support of the press, the waste that was piling up in the streets, and the spike in yellow fever cases led to yet another victory for the workers. According to the Revista Illustrada of 19 February 1876, “finally the City Council, the Police, and the Ministry had to respond to the noble class of cart drivers” and the contested rulings were overturned.Footnote 57 Not surprisingly, just after the end of the strike, the defeated City Council again discussed the possibility of giving a company a monopoly over the collection of domestic waste. It was more important than ever for the authorities that the service should not remain in the hands of the cart drivers who had repeatedly defeated them, and who had been able to block the City Council's attempts to control and even abolish their work.
With regard to the carters who collected waste, the 1873 strike was an attempt by workers to stop the increasingly aggressive process in the city whereby workers would no longer own their instruments of production. In 1897, the city government, finally, signed another contract with a company and carters were no longer allowed to carry out their traditional work. Although the company acquired a monopoly of domestic waste collection, it is possible to identify the enduring persistence of the self-employed in other spheres of the transport sector, albeit in small numbers.
Transport workers also saw themselves affected by (and acted against) the introduction of certain more general laws. In 1890, following the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889, workers in the urban transport sector went on strike to protest against the Penal Code of 11 October 1890. Most of Rio de Janeiro's newspapers claimed that the coach drivers and cart drivers were complaining about provisions that were not, in fact, included in this new Code. For example, the Jornal do Commercio, a newspaper of general circulation, claimed that the workers’ allegations were not founded on facts and must have been maliciously invented by “wretched speculators who thrive on the simplicity of the workers”, and who manipulated the “placid spirits of these poor coachmen”.Footnote 58 One dissenting voice, however, was that of the Gazeta da Tarde, in its 2 December 1890 edition. The newspaper said that a commission formed by transport workers had gone to the newspaper to explain that their protest was not as unjustified “as is generally believed[;] even if the item that was discussed at such length yesterday does not in fact exist, there are in the legislative reform of Mr Campos Salles some draconian proposals and it is against these proposals that the cart drivers are protesting”.Footnote 59 The commission from the workers cited in particular two of the articles in the Code, addressing the issue of punishment for accidents.
The evidence that the workers sent a commission to the newspaper casts them in a new light, not as helpless and simple souls manipulated by forces that were using them for their own purposes, but as people with clear, conscious demands, who knew exactly what they were fighting for and who they were fighting against. By specifically citing the articles in the Code that they were opposing, the workers were able to rebut the accusation made by the Diário de Notícias newspaper that they were not really protesting against the Penal Code, “mainly because the Code is almost unknown, even to educated people in the country”.Footnote 60
Although various newspapers argued that the offending article in the Penal Code relating to accidents did not apply only to coachmen and cart drivers, these workers understood that it did directly affect them. There were constant accidents involving their vehicles, and these accidents were one of the major points of conflict between drivers and passengers, with drivers widely caricatured and attacked in the press. In 1890 a child had been run over, leading to significant tension and protests from the population.Footnote 61 In this context, the vehicle drivers were well-advised to be concerned about any new law on accidents that would also apply to them.
As well as claiming that workers were being manipulated in the strike, some of the press also questioned the reasons for the walkout. According to the Diário de Notícias, “in every corner of the world the criminal code contains punishments for all kinds of crimes and there were never strikes against the law upheld by their governments”.Footnote 62 The Jornal do Commercio argued that “a workers’ strike aims either to right a wrong or to achieve an increase in pay. However, in this strike, the cart and coach drivers have no determined goal at all.”Footnote 63 The line of argument in these newspapers was, thus, that opposition to a particular law or ruling generally was neither a normal nor a sufficient ground for a strike.
However, some newspapers provided their readers with a different version of events. The Gazeta da Tarde explained why the coachmen had gone on strike in the following way, offering an interesting interpretation of the relationship between the strikes and the law:
Since the right of law was replaced by the right of force; since at every moment the law and administrative procedures are disparaged; since the people are represented by a congress full of appointees, without the authority to carry out justice or to right wrongs; since the people are convinced that the laws imposed on them do not reflect the will of the people but that of a cabal that keeps itself in power by force alone, and that these decrees and rules serve only to support interests that cannot always be disclosed, the one brake on popular unrest that exists along with religion, has disappeared – respect for the law has disappeared.Footnote 64
In 1899, new rules were established for inspecting vehicles. These consisted of the most detailed document ever produced at that time for controlling transport workers. These rules proved to be the trigger for the strike that started on 15 January 1900. The Gazeta de Notícias noted that the walkout was a consequence of a lack of clarity on the part of the police concerning the technical details of these new regulations. According to the newspaper, it was, for instance, incomprehensible that the police had made no statement about the rumours circulating that the coach drivers would have to be photographed.Footnote 65 Although the government said that the mandatory photograph requirement was only a rumour, the Jornal do Brasil, a newspaper of general circulation known to be concerned with workers’ conditions, then found out that for the coach drivers it was, in fact, a real obligation, even though it did not appear in the new regulations. The workers alleged that several companies, such as São Christovão, had published rules requiring a photograph of the worker to be taken, and that vehicle inspectors were also requiring photographs.
But why did the workers protest so strongly against being photographed by the police? As all the newspapers of the time explained, until then it was only thieves whose photographs were taken by the police. A member of the police anthropometry service wrote that the photographs were used for purposes of identification, so that the suspects could not use any name they desired.Footnote 66 When they learned that they would be photographed compulsorily, the drivers believed they were being equated with common thieves. Their demand for the requirement to be dropped was closely connected to the symbolic aspects of the requirement for a police photograph, which represented the tightening of police control over the workers.
Following the end of the transport workers’ strike, on 17 January the Beneficial Society for the Protection of Coachmen delivered a document to the Ministry of Justice containing the demands of its members. This document also protested that coachmen were being charged fees for licences that were higher than the amounts that had been set. In addition, the coachmen complained about certain provisions of the rules, such as Article 36, which covered the impounding of vehicles. The document alleged that it was unfair that coachmen and cart drivers were to be doubly punished: in addition to having their licences confiscated the seizure of their vehicles would lead to further expenses for recovering them from the pound.Footnote 67 The workers were successful. On 20 January, the Minister of Justice, Epitácio Pessoa, issued a decree that accepted all the amendments requested in the submissions lodged by the Beneficial Society for the Protection of Coachmen.Footnote 68
The laws and regulations cited in this article indicate the concern of the institutions of the state with controlling transport workers, workers who, as mentioned above, formed a constant presence in the public space and had direct and daily contact with the population. The relationship between passengers and transport workers could be very contentious, especially with regard to the frequent vehicular accidents. The causes of such accidents were widely discussed in the press, impunity being considered the major contributor to the large number of cases. The population demanded that the government act vigorously, and the regulations and laws reflected this demand too.Footnote 69 The forms of control were tightened over time in Rio de Janeiro, with increasingly detailed regulations, while at the same time they were adapted to the technological transformations of the sector, such as the specific regulation created to cover electric trams, which arrived in the city in 1892.
It was not only in Rio de Janeiro that transport workers were the subject of extensive laws and that these measures constituted an important trigger in their strikes. In Lisbon, two out of three stoppages organized by transport workers in the nineteenth century were linked to laws approved by the City Council. In turn, in April 1899, the coachmen of Buenos Aires went on strike to protest against the City Council’s decision to require them to have a photograph taken in order to get a driver's licence.Footnote 70
For their part, the transport workers had their own readings and interpretations of these measures and demonstrated their response in actions such as the series of strikes that have been analysed in this article. In their reactions, the workers challenged “the law as an instrument of power of dominant groups”, and made use of the “legal resources available to defend their rights and subvert the original purpose of the legal codes, which was to serve the interests of the ruling elites”.Footnote 71 Their struggles against new laws also show just how well the coachmen and cart drivers understood that strikes represented an effective means of restricting the actions of the dominant classes.Footnote 72
Conclusions
Over the course of this article it has been shown how the urban transport sector in Rio de Janeiro underwent major changes in the nineteenth century. Many scholars have analysed these transformations in terms of the various technologies involved. Here, however, I have tried to present a different perspective, focusing on the direct impact of the changes on the workers involved, most notably on how those changes transformed the city from one that relied mainly on slave porters for its freight transport to one that used vehicles driven largely by free workers. The introduction of new means of transport and the transformation of the workforce caused competition and ethnic conflict. Further, in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century the barrier between free and unfree labour was very diffuse and confusing.
The establishment of the first major transport companies in the city was directly connected to the transformation of the Brazilian economy in general. Labour in these companies was subject to strict controls, regulations, and inspections, as this was a sector in which workers travelled all over the city and spent much of their working day far from the eyes of their employers. Coach drivers and cart drivers, company employees and self-employed workers alike, were also subject to various laws and regulations emanating from the City Council and the police.
Faced with these transformations in their sector, transport workers were by no means passive. Indeed, they were much more active than is supposed in the only study to date on Rio de Janeiro's coach drivers and cart drivers, authored by Ana Maria da Silva Moura.Footnote 73 In my research, I found that these workers made various submissions to different state institutions about the changes, protested in their places of work, and organized a number of strikes. Of the fifteen stoppages organized by the urban transport workers of Rio de Janeiro over the course of the nineteenth century, nine were linked to questions of remuneration, either to protest for higher wages or to demand the payment of outstanding wages. The main motives for four of the remaining strikes (which this article has analysed) were provided by new laws and police regulations. These were supported by a solid majority of the workers. The strikes organized by the coachmen and cart drivers were able to disrupt an essential service in the urban space and to affect a range of other economic sectors. The strikes also enjoyed popular support and participation, often taking the form of opposition to police repression. These elements help us to understand why transport workers were the sector that experienced the highest number of strikes in Rio de Janeiro in this period.
