Taking the Measure of Labor: Rural Rationalization in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Taking the Measure of Labor: RuralRationalization in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Thomas D. RogersEmory University

Abstract

Rural sugarcane workers in the Brazilian Northeast negotiated with planters in 1963 toestablish guidelines for measuring jobs, producing a document they called the TaskTable. This article situates the Table in historical context, placing it in a long-termprocess of agricultural rationalization that generated struggles over !exibility, control,and freedom on the job. The Table emerged at one moment in these battles and sincecon!icts like these over productivity, ef"ciency, and control are common to industrialand agricultural work alike, analyzing the Table offers insight into a broad strugglebetween workers and employers over the conditions and regulation of labor. For aregion of hundreds of thousands of sugarcane workers, the Task Table re!ected andfacilitated the transformation of labor relationships, views of the working environment,and worker consciousness.

Joaquim Manuel dos Santos began working in the northeastern Brazilian sugar-cane "elds of Pernambuco in 1936, when he was fourteen years old. As a child,he heard that some people in cities earned good wages working only eight hoursa day, but he knew agricultural workers worked long days in the "elds andearned next to nothing. As soon as he saw an opportunity to improve those con-ditions, he seized it. When the federal government legalized rural organizing inJune of 1963, he joined a union, remaining a member until he retired and servingas an of"cer from 1976 until 2000. In a series of interviews conducted in 2003,Santos talked about the transformations of workers’ conditions and rightsover the course of the twentieth century. Citing milestones of progress inworking conditions, he emphasized an agreement that workers negotiatedwith plantation and mill owners, forged in the same month that unions gainedlegal status. The parties produced the Table of Field Tasks (most frequentlycalled the Task Table), a short document that spelled out guidelines for taskassignments, such as how much cane a worker should cut in a day to earn hispay. Unions offered workers support and solidarity, Santos said, but theTable offered a bulwark every single day to protect them from overzealousforemen and managers. “If you don’t work by the Table,” he said, “everythinggoes to hell.”1

The elaboration of the Table marked one chapter in the much larger storyof capitalist development and the rationalization of production in this area ofnortheastern Brazil. Labor dynamics hinge on these changes, and an episodelike the creation of the Task Table highlights the nature of the relationshipsbetween workers and employers and between both groups and the state. This

International Labor and Working-Class HistoryNo. 85, Spring 2014, pp. 138–161# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2014doi:10.1017/S0147547913000537

article puts this moment in Pernambuco’s labor history in broad context, step-ping back to appreciate the Table’s larger signi"cance. The Table imposedrules on the sugarcane labor process and served as a crucial instrument forthe assignment of labor tasks and for the mediation of work relations. Alongwith institutions established at nearly the same time, such as rural laborcourts, the Table re!ected and facilitated the transformation of labor relation-ships, views of the working environment, and worker consciousness in thecane zone. Analyzing the Table also provides a window into one speci"cbattle in a much larger struggle between workers and employers over the con-ditions and regulation of labor. The Table was an innovation at different scalesof history: it was simultaneously a milestone in the centuries-long andcon!ict-ridden rationalization of agrarian work measurements and a tool ofnegotiation in a shorter-term, though still deep-rooted, con!ict betweenworkers and planters. The "rst section of the article traces the history of thisrationalization process in the Brazilian Northeast. The second section describesthe creation of the Task Table in its immediate context and its implications forworkers. The third section documents the Table’s survival, even in the contextof state repression of labor. The "nal section offers a case study of labor courtjudges’ application of the Table in a labor dispute.

The Evolution of Measurement in Sugarcane Work

As in most other rural areas around the world, agricultural work in Pernambucowas a hyperlocal affair with remarkable variability in standards and expec-tations across the region. Around the cane-producing zone, an area about thesize of Connecticut, individual planters organized production and directedtheir workers according to varying norms and standards. These regionalquirks persisted deep into the twentieth century despite the fact that sugarhad been produced at a large scale and for export to far-!ung destinations forhundreds of years. Sugar exports from the Brazilian Northeast to Lisbon hadbegun in the "rst half of the sixteenth century, and cane farming continued unin-terrupted through Brazilian independence and the Imperial period, weatheringstiff competition across the centuries from Antillean producers and Europeansugar beet planters, not to mention sugarcane growers in other parts ofBrazil. In its localism, Pernambuco’s sugarcane industry did not differ frommost of its competitors. Precapitalist and agrarian economies overwhelminglydepended on local units and idiosyncratic measurement systems, often tied tohuman anatomy like a forearm, a hand, a thumb.2 For measuring land areas,most parts of the world up through the nineteenth century tended to cleaveto one of two approaches, gauging either by labor time or by the amount ofseed required for planting. So a farmer might refer to two harvest days’ worthof wheat, or he might say that he had planted two bushels of land, if that wasthe amount of seed he had used.3

In Pernambuco, most sugarcane farmers measured land according to a unitcalled a “task” (tarefa), a measure related to labor, though in this case the mill’s,

Taking the Measure of Labor 139

not the cane cutter’s. The task was an areal estimate of standing cane that wouldsatisfy a mill for a single day of grinding. A keenly observant Jesuit who wrote amanual for new plantation owners in the 1690s advised, “Planting a task of canesis the same as planting a space of thirty square arms (braças) of land.”4 We willget to braças soon, but the Jesuit’s gesture toward regularization of the taskfoundered in the face of local preferences. Two and a half centuries later, a geo-grapher traveling around the sugar-producing Northeast found little agreementon the size of a task. Affonso Várzea wrote inGeography of Sugar (Geogra!a deaçúcar) that planters gave him "gures for the unit that ranged from 3000 all theway to 4400 square meters.5 Despite its variability, the task persisted into the1950s as a unit for expressing areas of land. As a function of a day’s worth ofwork at the mill, the task had an oblique relationship to labor, but in themiddle of the twentieth century it began to be used in a different sense, as amore direct measurement of work assignments. Agricultural practices lentthemselves to overlapping and blurred measurements of work and of space orvolume (as in amounts of grain or fruit harvested).

Customary, local measurement systems were woven into social relationsand shaped lived experience; their disruption implied serious upheaval in com-munities. When Brazil’s Imperial government attempted to impose the metricsystem in 1874 and 1875, revolts broke out in the Northeast, includingPernambuco. Rural people burned tax and population records, protested mili-tary impressment, and violently expressed their frustration with a time of econ-omic depression. The upheaval became known as the Kilogram-Breaker Revolt(Revolta do Quebra-quilos), a name that emphasized the trigger for the popularanger. Over the year and a half of sporadic violence that spread across four pro-vinces, crowds repeatedly destroyed weights and measures in market towns.Far-!ung subsistence farmers, ranch hands, and small town dwellers fearedfraud at the hands of the unfamiliar new measurements. They discerned a malig-nant relationship between this imposition and potential taxation from a distantand unfriendly government, and they wanted to protect local control over theirown affairs. Even worse, the Imperial government charged towns taxes on themeasurement utensils themselves, since it cost money to manufacture the pre-cisely calibrated weights and boxes (the latter for volume measurements). Sorural crowds lashed out at the concrete manifestations of change, breaking orstealing the new weights in market towns.6

Spasms of opposition to regularization speak to anxieties associated withmodernization and what Max Weber called rationalization, the gradual elimin-ation of local speci"city by national standards (and even supranational ones, inthe case of the metric or “French” system) that facilitate the operation ofmarkets and the functioning of the state.7 These transitions generally accom-pany agricultural modernization, meaning the adoption of more ef"cient tech-niques (such as the abandonment of "eld fallowing in favor of the routine useof fertilizers) and the systematic integration into broader market circuits.Changes in agricultural and industrial production frequently proceed intandem. Indeed, the industrial revolution developed in concert with the

140 ILWCH, 85, Spring 2014

agricultural revolution; the two depended on and fed one another.8 It stands toreason that rural and industrial labor modes would have much in common. In hisclassic study of modern “time-discipline’s” emergence, E. P. Thompson concernshimself primarily with how the proliferation of clocks and timed labor tasksaffected tradesmen and craftspeople and early industrial laborers. But he alsonoted that “enclosure and agricultural improvement were both, in somesense, concerned with the ef"cient husbandry of the time of the labor-force.”9

Field workers, too, had to contend with large landowners approaching laborexploitation in new ways.

Working people’s experiences unfolded on the bleeding edge of the borderbetween measurements of labor and measurements of space and weight. Evenwhen workers do not greet change with violent resistance, they can in!uence theprocess of introducing and regulating new units. Anthropologist Sidney Mintzlearned this in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, when the subject of his classic ethnogra-phy Worker in the Cane related details about the work of cane-holing. This jobconsists of digging holes to drop in small pieces of sugarcane, which eventuallygrow into a "eld of new-growth cane; workers generally had large areas to com-plete in a day. Instructed to use a measuring stick for maintaining a precise dis-tance between each hole, workers would obediently measure when the foremanwas around but in his absence would throw the stick aside and measure out theholes by their stride. “It was awkward and also cost time to use the measure,”Don Taso said, and he and his colleagues preferred to measure on the !y.10

Taso zeroes in here on an area of constant con!ict between workers and man-agers, which is the question of ef"ciency and time. The fact is that the twogroups frequently have very different de"nitions and priorities for both.

In Brazil, from the abolition of slavery in 1888, sugarcane workers gener-ally lived on the plantations, their wages complemented by a tenantry arrange-ment granting them access to land for a garden plot. Administrators andforemen managed work gangs on an ad hoc basis, with workers receivingdaily wages. (Actually, workers operated on the notional promise of dailywages even as they frequently suffered without regular pay.) In the secondquarter of the twentieth century, management moved slowly toward spatialtasks paid according to areal units completed and fewer workers receivedwages based purely on their working a set number of hours during the day.The “count” (conta) appeared in this context, a unit meant to approximateone day’s work. Foremen measured out the counts with long wooden or ironrods that they carried with them as they rode horseback through the "elds,like slave overseers before them. Called varas, these rods with hooks at theend came to serve as the designated tools for measuring out another old unitwith a long history, a braça (from braço, or arm, exemplifying the anatomicallinks of so many measures). The braça eventually stabilized at 2.2 meters andbecame the standard unit for measuring counts.11 The count began to spreadin the 1920s and 1930s and by the mid-1940s was employed by planters through-out the sugarcane region. Its proliferation accompanied a major shift in pro-duction as large-capacity mills spread and engulfed smaller plantations. The


greater capacity of these mills, in turn, drove up sugar production. Count areas!uctuated according to the nature of the job required, and remunerationdepended on the established wage of a given location or property.

This new system of "eld work emerged in the context of an increased scaleand pace of sugar production in the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1948 and 1962,plantations expanded their area planted in cane by nearly two-thirds to feedthe new mills. The expansion was fueled by state-supported research, the adop-tion of new cane varieties, and increased fertilizer use.12 Planters argued thatthey needed to streamline their processes and introduce ef"ciencies in theirworkforce. The “count” ended up as an intermediate step in that direction. Itstill linked payment to the notion of a generic day of labor, but planters gradu-ally altered their approach, increasingly assigning tasks in such a way that thepace could be increased by adjusting measurements, or payment rates adjustedbased on production. This shift led some planters toward the use of a largermeasure, intended to occupy a worker for more than one day: the task.13

With the advent of the task—a new use of the term, distinguished from theolder idea of a day’s worth of milling—a day’s labor rarely equated to the com-pletion of a particular spatial quantum of labor. Workers could not "nish a taskin a day, so they were tied to a particular site for longer and their payday wasdelayed.

Field workers also found themselves captive to the measurements dictatedby foremen who had incentives to push the boundaries of task sizes. Workersfrom the cane zone still remember the punitive assignment of tasks from the1950s. A worker named Severino José da Silva said in a 2003 interview, “The‘task’ was a square and it was measured according to whatever size the bosswanted; 12 [braças] by 13, 15 by 15. Anything.” Da Silva began cutting canein 1947 as a nine-year-old, and he remembered that the more cane a workerwould cut, the more the foreman demanded.14 Switching the payment schemefrom time to space by eliminating daily pay and introducing task wages, plantersrationalized the work process, introducing incentive structures and trying toensure higher levels of productivity. While it may have been more “rational,”the system clearly skewed in favor of the bosses, who could reduce paymentamounts, or eliminate them entirely, according to a highly subjective (and notdisinterested) decision about whether or not the work was “well done.”15

According to the anthropologist Lygia Sigaud, after a worker completed atask, the plantation inspector (a step above a foreman) would study the workdone, almost always reducing the worker’s wages because of allegedly poorwork.16

One way to describe the proliferation of measured jobs in the "elds,whether through “counts,” “tasks,” or anything else, is through the emergenceof piecework in the sugarcane region. Such a development is largely unremark-able for an (agro) industry in expansion, as the sugarcane sector was at the time.Rural piecework has received far less attention among sociologists and histor-ians than has its counterpart in industrial settings, though studies of wagesystems in general and particularly the growth of and negotiation of piece


rates are surprisingly scarce.17 Industrial Revolution-era England likely wit-nessed the "rst widespread emergence of piecework, unless we considercertain types of slave labor organization.18 British historian Richard Pricewrites that the acceleration of building projects with industrialization broughtthe "rst attempts to impose piecework in the building trades. Builders andmasons, in particular, repeatedly mounted strikes opposing the practicethroughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Price recounts astruggle by railroad workers in 1837 against a “tyrannical” foreman, whose“predilection for piecework was notorious; by some he was even creditedwith inventing the system.” He employed what would become a classicmethod, urging a strong worker toward a particular goal and then setting his per-formance as the standard for all to meet.19 This technique, called “chasing,” wasessentially the same as what Da Silva described when he mentioned the exigentforemen of his youth.

Planters and supporters of sugarcane agriculture encountered frustrationsduring the introduction of piecework just as their peers in industry had to "ne-tune the process when they changed their labor management. In the mid-1940s,an agronomist claimed that workers could earn more in less time than they hadbefore by completing multiple “counts” in a day. But instead of “improvingthemselves” by working hard and accumulating money, he said they workedless. The comparatively new remuneration scheme created “opportunities forlaziness,” he argued, and a false labor scarcity.20 His analysis sounds uncannilylike the arguments of liberal reformers seeking to yank “backward” populationsinto modern, liberal, capitalistic society, whether in industrializing societies orCaribbean colonies after the abolition of slavery. Those cases, in fact, reinforcedone another and exhibited common patterns. Thomas Holt argues that theBritish used “the centuries-old process of ‘liberating’ their own rural workforce”as their model for molding a docile and hardworking population of ex-slavesin the colonies. Not surprisingly, part of the approach included movingworkers gradually from daily wages to task work.21 The sequence of changesPernambuco’s cane workers experienced between abolition and the mid-twentieth century had direct parallels elsewhere.

A Bid to Control the Working Environment: The Task Table

Pernambuco’s sugarcane workers, like their counterparts in Jamaica a centuryearlier, chafed against the dif"culties of the new forms of labor managementin the "elds. They also reacted angrily to planters’ modi"cations of tenantryarrangements, another echo of postabolition experiences in the Caribbeanand similar processes elsewhere in Latin America. Opening or restrictingaccess to garden plots was a practice common to many of these experiences.A 1961 survey of Pernambuco’s sugarcane region carried out by a research insti-tute found that well over half of the rural workers still had access to land for sub-sistence production. But the numbers were in clear decline, and, on average,families across the region produced only 10 percent of their food. Seven years


later, many fewer had access to land, and only half of those that did were able touse it.22 The expanding sugar "elds displaced workers, since the crop both occu-pied land and demanded more labor for cultivation and harvest, denyingworkers the time to manage garden plots.23 As early as the 1940s, federal of"-cials saw in the changes faced by the sugarcane workers a clear threat to ruralpeace, and they worried about an “exodus” of workers from countryside tocity. A 1941 federal law called the Sugarcane Agriculture Statute (Estatuto daLavoura Canavieira, ELC) mandated that workers resident on a plantationfor more than one year receive access to land close to their houses and of asize large enough to provide their families with food. But in practice, few plan-ters obeyed this prescription.24

Just as the spread of the “task” can be abstracted as the rise of pieceworkand an aspect of agricultural rationalization, we can describe the combination ofpiecework and the erosion of patronage norms surrounding traditional tenantryas the proletarianization of the sugarcane work force. This did not take placequickly, and indeed one could debate whether it has ever reached completion.But it generated clear effects in the 1950s and 1960s.25 Pernambuco’s sugarcaneworkers roughly followed this pattern, though their initial organizing effortstook other forms. Industrial workers in Brazil gained legal recognition forunions starting in the 1930s, but rural workers were denied such state sanctionand protection even though labor legislation was ambiguous on the subject.Formal organization in the sugarcane region began at its periphery among small-holders and farmers. Starting in 1955, groups from these border municipalitiesformed organizations called Peasant Leagues (Ligas Camponesas) and congre-gated under the leadership of a lawyer named Francisco Julião. At the sametime, leftist political activists from the state capital Recife, which lies in themiddle of the sugarcane zone, built an electoral coalition to support left-leaninglocal and statewide candidates. They actively campaigned among the Leaguemembers and reached out to cane workers as well, successfully electing theircandidates to the state governorship and Recife mayoralty in 1958 and 1962.26

At the beginning of the 1960s, a rural unionization movement joined thePeasant Leagues. And "nally rural workers around the country gained legal rec-ognition of unions with the passage of the Rural Labor Statute (Estatuto doTrabalhador Rural, ETR) in June of 1963. What the shift in labor law haddone for urban workers in the 1930s and the ETR did for rural workers entailedthe establishment of a state structure for recognizing and supporting a singleunion in a given industry. This corporatist approach to organized labor linksunions directly to the state via the Labor Ministry, with intermediate "guressuch as regional labor delegates whose presence enforces the tight linkagebetween state bureaucracy and the workers’ organizations. State support forworkers !ows downward through the unions, including social services andbene"ts such as pensions.27 State action toward unions varied depending onthe type of regime in power, but its presence was always strong.

At precisely the same time that the ETR passed, Pernambuco experienceda particularly tumultuous month, with the unionization movement accelerating


in response to the new legislation. Miguel Arraes, the governor elected in 1962by the socialist coalition, encouraged the workers, and they began usingsmall-scale strikes to push for higher wages and better conditions. At the endof the month, the new unions sent representatives to Recife to meet with plan-tation and sugar mill owners. Arraes mediated as the workers and bosses dis-cussed payment practices in the sugar "elds, grappling with fundamentalquestions about the list of tasks that comprised modern cane agriculture andhow to measure assignments for each job. Rooted in these speci"cs, theworkers and employers’ discussion was animated by questions of !exibility,control, ef"ciency, productivity, and protection from exploitation.28

Before the discussions had reached their conclusion, a strike by "eldworkers at the Roçadinho sugar mill provided an example of workers’ discon-tent with the task-based payment schemes. The governor who had servedfrom 1958 to 1962 owned the Roçadinho Mill, so Recife’s main daily newspapergave the strike prominent coverage. The reporter on the scene clearly did notsympathize with the workers, and he made the curious claim that the “pretextfor the strike was to demand a lower salary.” Work at Roçadinho was basedon tasks measured out in braças. Foremen assigned tasks of 625 squarebraças, the reporter explained, paid at a rate of 2000 cruzeiros. Since a workercould complete a task in two or three days, the reporter calculated, he shouldearn 600 to 700 cruzeiros a day. But the strikers’ central demand was a returnto payments based on the count. (The reporter erroneously described these asmore or less ten square meters, depending on the terrain.29) Generally,workers completing counts earned 500 cruzeiros a day. “One sees, by thenumbers,” the author concluded, “that the strikers ‘demand’ the reduction oftheir salaries from 700 and even 800 cruzeiros to 500 a day.”30

The reporter’s sarcasm indicates that he had not fully understood theworkers’ aims. First, his estimates of wages by the “task” may have overesti-mated the system’s transparency. While Roçadinho workers may have had theopportunity to earn the wages he calculated, in practice they likely did not.Tasks were too vague, too easily manipulated by foremen who would in!atetheir measurements or refuse to approve the workers’ progress. Second, theworkers probably prioritized control of their work rhythm over the potentialfor higher wages; they could more easily achieve control by taking jobsmeasured for completion in a single day. Working by the “count” would havemaximized their !exibility and their options, opening room to balance wagework with subsistence farming, for instance. They likely valued this measureof control over the dispensation of their labor more highly than they valued mar-ginal wage increases.31 Holt provides a similar theory for ex-slave rural workersin Jamaica who hoped to supplement their gardening with occasional plantationwage work. According to his analysis, they prized autonomy over all else.32

Similarly, a sociologist studying brick works in Oaxaca in the early 1980sfound that workers could choose between daily wages that obligated them towork every weekday or piece wages, which they could earn by working when-ever they wished. One worker told him, “I like the piece wage better because


one is not forced to work continually. Tomorrow, if you want to work you do so;if you don’t want to work you don’t have to.”33

The Roçadinho strike and the general push for control provided thecontext for the negotiations that Arraes mediated. Both workers and planterswanted to control the timing of work and how it would be measured.Eventually, the groups hammered out an agreement that became known asthe “Accord of the Fields.”34 They expressed the principles of their bargain ina document: the Task Table. This uni"ed set of standards stipulated normsand expectations for every job in sugarcane agriculture.35 The Table outlined,for instance, how much land a worker must clear or weed in a given workday, specifying different amounts depending on the type of terrain the workerfaced. Each plantation had to post the Table openly, and foremen were enjoinedto measure tasks according to its prescriptions. In subsequent years, ruralworkers’ unions zealously demanded compliance with the Table, even as theyfaced widespread resistance from planters hoping to squeeze more productionfrom their workers.

The Table established some basic ground rules in the "rst several clauses ofits scant eight pages. The universal measure for cane work in the state was to bethe braça of 2.2 meters; a count was ten square braças; and a workday was eighthours. There followed norms for twenty different tasks, from clearing land toharvesting cane—the entire series of jobs required to ready the "eld, plantand care for the cane, and harvest it and get it to the mill. For each, theamount of work required during an eight-hour day was established. Many ofthese were measured out in counts, though cane harvesting was measuredinstead by 20-cane bundles of cut cane. Eight “special rules” followed thework guidelines, including contingencies for disagreements between workerand overseer (for example, over cane being “good to cut” or “sparse”). Inthose cases, the worker was to simply render eight hours of a work in exchangefor the minimum wage (though supervision by a disgruntled foreman followingan argument would seem to have its disadvantages). Finally, eleven holidayswere speci"ed for recognition by planters.36

The Table complemented the new protections brought by the Rural LaborStatute (ETR). In many ways the Statute simply extended to rural areas thesame suite of protections that urban workers had long enjoyed and thatGetúlio Vargas concretized with the 1943 Consolidation of Labor Laws(Consolidação das leis do trabalho, CLT).37 Vargas’s attempt to include ruralworkers with an additional law in 1944 was ineffective and so for anothertwenty years workers remained under the strict control of rural employers.The ETR required that employers provide workers with work cards, a modeof documenting the labor relationship that helped render sugar workersvisible to the state. With a legal, documented employment tie, workers receivedentitlement to bene"ts, union membership, and social services. They also hadaccess to labor courts—local labor boards (Juntas de Conciliação eJulgamento, JCJs), a regional tribunal (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho, TRT),and, at the top of the labor judiciary, a superior court (Tribunal Superior do


Trabalho, TST).38 These courts played crucial roles in the new system of laborrelations, becoming privileged forums for con!ict between workers and employ-ers, with their own norms and a language that both parties eventually learned touse strategically.

The workers rapidly availed themselves of these new rights and institutions,but the Task Table gave them a concrete tool for protecting themselves in the"eld. It carried symbolic weight, as a measure won directly from the planters,and it had consequences for relations between workers and their bossesalmost as signi"cant as those produced by the ETR. The legendary communistorganizer Gregório Bezerra, responsible for unionizing a large percentage ofthe cane region’s workers, called the Table one of the most important conquestsof that tumultuous time, on par with the ETR and large-scale unionization.39 Hispassion for the Table recalls the strenuous efforts of port workers in Santos, inthe southern state of São Paulo, to achieve control over the pace, organization,and measurement of their work. Fernando Teixeira da Silva analyzes theseworkers’ pride in being “workers without bosses,” by establishing their ownhiring methods within the union and incorporating overseers into the unionstructure. They faced a dif"cult task, especially in an industry typi"ed by spora-dic labor demands, but in 1956 achieved the right to name foremen from withintheir union.40 The sugarcane workers fought over the same principle of exertingcontrol, understanding that even with the bene"ts and protections of the ETR,they faced the capriciousness of planters on the plantations. They needed amechanism regularizing norms and expectations, something to keep the plan-ters’ targets from constantly shifting and to control the inexorable drift of piece-work toward increased expectations of worker productivity. In providing themeans for that control, something that carried the backing of the state, theTable contributed to a shift in the dynamics of power on the plantations.

In some respects the Table was unremarkable; it simply tabulated individ-ual jobs with benchmarks for production within a given workday. It also clearlyaccepted the normative standing of task-based labor, or piecework. In this, itparallels the concessions that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britishworkers made to the rise of time-discipline, as Thompson describes them. Hechronicles the direct resistance laborers initially put up to the onslaught thatpeople’s working habits suffered. But in a second stage, “as the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to "ght, not against time, butabout it.”41 In the same way, Pernambuco’s sugarcane workers fought to regu-late tasks, rather than to discard them.42 We lack records telling us what theRoçadinho workers thought of the Task Table, but they probably approved.The guidelines prescribed day-long tasks, not larger ones, preserving workers’freedom to manage their weeks as they wished, within the broader constraintsof shifting tenantry rules.

Bezerra appreciated the Table for its protection of workers against arbi-trary treatment in the "elds, but the Table also had other implications. Clearlythe Table represented a new stage in the con!ict over labor time and measure-ment, another phase in a struggle that had witnessed the earlier transition from


time payments to task payments. But in its outline of work quanta for aneight-hour day, the Table’s sensitivity to variations in terrain and conditionsstands out. The Table also, then, meant a new perspective toward the environ-ment of labor. In land clearing (roçagem), for instance, it separated thick,medium, and sparse brush, with requirements running from one-half to oneand a half counts for the different categories. We can analyze this new perspec-tive in at least two ways. First, the Table changed understandings and lived rea-lities of space and power. Plantations had been realms of nearly unquestionedplanter authority, but the Table, a mediating instrument between workers andbosses, represented the introduction of a competing power into this space.43

Second, the Table established a new perspective toward the cane "elds, onethat was much more sensitive to agro-environmental nuance than the traditionalplanter view that was guided by the simple imperative to corral and controllabor.

A very simple example of the Table perspective lies in the category of caneharvesting, an arduous job that serves as a metonym for cane work in general—when a worker says, “I cut cane,” s/he usually means s/he does cane work gen-erally. In the stipulations for cane cutting, the Table included the categoriesgood, medium, and sparse cane, and followed with the note that “good caneto cut is understood as thin canes on clear land.”44 A worker interviewed in2003 had to think for a minute before describing “good cane,” a phrase hehad used repeatedly; it seemed an intuitively obvious category to him. He even-tually said good cane meant “thick and growing close together, and good andstrong … it’s good in a !at area or a recently planted area.”45 This contrastbetween the Table’s de"nition and the worker’s shows that the very idea of“good cane to cut” is inherently subjective, and cane "elds themselves are in"-nitely variable. The orderly grid of the Table cannot precisely capture thisdouble variation. In a sense, any process in the human and natural worlds con-tains vast variability, no matter how straightforward it appears. But theTable tried to capture and account for the variability of both worker preferenceand environmental conditions, and it is important to register this perspective andrecognize its divergence from the prior norms. This shift also produced changesin behavior.

While the de"nition of good cane was subjective and variable, it wasneither arbitrary nor unimportant. In the years following the ETR’s passage,planters sought various ways to cut labor costs. One was to hire workerswithout signing work cards, thereby avoiding state oversight and dispensingwith the bene"ts those workers should have received. During these earlyyears after the ETR, planters may have anticipated support from the state forthis tactic because the military seized power in 1964, a development discussedfurther below. Planters would punish formally contracted workers by offeringmore desirable tasks to the informal workers. A complaint that a union presi-dent sent to the regional labor inspector in 1966 details this approach on thelands of the Tiuma Mill. The foremen would send the informal workers to cut“good cane” while the formal workers were sent to parts of the "elds full of


weeds. The mill’s "eld administrator justi"ed the practice, the union of"cialwrote, complaining that labor productivity had fallen since the Table’s adop-tion.46 Workers cleaved tightly to the Table, internalizing its rules and prescrip-tions. The workers Santos and Da Silva both made frequent mention in theirinterviews of the various measurements for tasks, rattling them off bymemory: x amount of land to weed with hard ground, y amount when certaintenacious weeds were involved, and on and on.47

In its aspirations to synthesize and represent, the Table looks like the sortof “simplifying instruments” of state power that James Scott describes in SeeingLike a State, his study of high modernist ideologies and the schemes for controldevised by twentieth century authoritarian states. He argues that states seek toimprove the “legibility” of societies by devising mechanisms—such as censusesand cadastral surveys—for clarifying technocrats’ vision of the natural and socialorder. Scott begins his book with a brief history of modern scienti"c forestry’semergence in Germany, an example that does not involve state interactionwith society. But he wants to describe the state’s attempt to order and controlthe environment through rationally outlined, grid-based forest plots, intendingto demonstrate the connection between this urge for environmental controland high modernist states’ approach to their societies. For people, states usedcensuses and registries instead of plat maps of forest, but the basic techniqueswere the same. Schemes to control the environment reappear in Scott’s argu-ments throughout the book. In both the “natural” and the human cases, Scottargues, the instruments that states develop to monitor and oversee actuallychange the reality they describe. Mixed German hardwood forests becameorderly rows of single species; social subjects are gradually molded into ashape congenial to state vision.48

The Table generated a new reality, an abstraction from the environmentaldiversity and work process of the actual labor that took place in the "elds.Though the shape of the Task Table "ts the model Scott describes, it did not orig-inate as a state tool for oversight and measurement but was born at a moment ofworker power, through a process of negotiation with planters.49 It was intendednot to control workers so much as planters, or to restrain the amount of workdemanded.50 The workers took the measure of labor in the sense of controllingthe means or methods of measurement, pushing against planters’ attempts tomeasure labor as a means of increasing demands. We see a parallel to thisapproach in the system workers established in the British West Indian caneindustry of the 1940s, where they mastered “a complicated system of taskde"nitions.” An economist at the time claimed that the rules “stagger[ed] theunderstanding of outsiders,” but workers used the system to maximize theirearnings, and their unions fought assiduously to protect it.51 Pernambuco’sunions did not achieve quite so favorable a system, but they were still able toexert a measure of control over their workplace through the Table.52 Theworkers were not alone in seeing the attraction of a regulating instrument;the military state found the Table useful as well as it extended its involvementin the sugar industry.53


The Task Table Weathers Political Storms

The tumult of 1963 reached a high point in November, when the rural workers’unions mounted the largest and best organized strike in the history of Brazil’srural labor movement. The state’s sugar mills shuddered to a halt as 200,000rural workers walked off the job. The strike ended with a collective agreementthat granted workers an 85 percent wage increase; the unions also demanded theTask Table’s inclusion in the agreement, emphasizing that all planters must obeyits provisions.54 The dramatic strike came in the context of acute political con!ictat the national level. President João Goulart vowed that he would enact sweep-ing structural reforms, including a land reform that promised to upend tradition-ally concentrated landholding patterns. The Brazilian military objected toGoulart’s plans and the threat they represented to political order. TheNortheast also weighed on their minds. They saw in Peasant League agitationand the rapid unionization of sugarcane workers, followed by their strike, thepotential for radical revolution.55 Tensions heightened in the early months of1964, and in April the military toppled Goulart and seized power.

With the military’s ascent and the arrests of leaders like Francisco Juliãoand Gregório Bezerra, sugarcane planters saw an opportunity to undo theAccord and insisted that the Table be reformulated. They claimed that theTable was unfair to them and that they had been “forced to respect it bythe Communists.” In response, the dictatorship made its "rst major incursioninto the nitty-gritty of labor in the cane zone. Their method indicated theywould take a hands-on, interventionist approach to the region and its dominantindustry. New military-appointed representatives from the Ministry of Labor,the state government, the army, and “quali"ed technicians” were assigned toresearch work norms in the region and to formulate a new Table.56 Thisthorough and heavily bureaucratized approach set the tone for the militarystate’s style in addressing labor issues and agricultural planning alike.

The dictatorship structured its systematic supervision of the industrywith the creation in 1965 of the Interministerial Working Group for the SugarIndustry (GTIA), which brought together the Northeastern DevelopmentAgency (SUDENE), the Agriculture Ministry, the Sugar and Alcohol Institute,the Pernambuco Development Company, the Rural Workers Federation(FETAPE), the State Secretary of Agriculture, and producer groups. The civi-lian governments of the 1950s and early 1960s had themselves embarked onan intensive planning adventure. For example, SUDENE, established in1959, represented an enormous experiment in the ef"cacy of planning; butthe military embraced structural planning with even greater fervor. Theywould go on to develop much farther reaching plans, including the SugarAgroindustry Rationalization Program and the National Program for SugarCane Improvement in 1971, the Support Program for the Sugar Agroindustryin 1973, and the National Alcohol Program in 1975.57 Each of these programsreceived enormous budgets and required "eld of"ces and staffs in multiplesugar-producing states. The dictatorship’s bureaucratization of the sugar


sector extended in multiple directions, and its treatment of the Task Table wasone small example of this approach.58

The team convened to write the new Table did not meet the sugar produ-cers’ expectations. Rather than scrapping the document as the planters hadhoped, the military’s commission added even more detailed prescriptions.When the original Task Table was established, it brought workers an elementof control over their work, but it was also explicitly backed by the power ofthe state, given that Arraes had midwifed its birth. This fact, combined withthe shape it took made the Table a congenial "t with the military regime’s tech-nocratic approach. The military commission embraced the previous version’sframework and added new levels of nuance and complexity. For example, theprevious Table had left weeding norms up to the “understanding” of theworker and foreman, but the “Table of the Revolution” (as the 1964Table came to be called) outlined six types of terrain for weeding, each withspeci"cally calibrated task sizes.59

The fact that the dictatorship retained the Task Table at all, and even lent itthe legitimacy of a recalibration, indicates the space left open after the coup forworkers’ activities. The unions remained as well, and though participationsagged when the military arrested prominent organizers following the coup,they had regained their earlier membership levels by 1967–1968.60 Given theclose state oversight of unions, the coup seriously threatened their continuedadvocacy for workers. But there were even a few strikes after the coup; inCabo the rural workers struck several times between 1965 and 1968 todemand respect for the Table and payment of back wages.61 Workers contendedwith widespread planter disregard for the Table, but having at least one legalweapon for their daily struggles in the "elds was better than having nothing atall. Francisco Julião captured this view of labor law when he acknowledgedthat labor law “does not and never has functioned fully” but emphasizedthat rural wage earners must conduct their movement within the laws’ bound-aries since they hold “a promise of liberation.”62 Crucially, this promise existedwithin the boundaries of state institutions. The Table, the rural labor courts,and Labor Ministry oversight of the unions had all existed for less than ayear when the military came to power. Under the new regime, these instru-ments and institutions came to exert effects on those implicated in their appli-cation.63 In the case of workers, the transforming effects of these institutionsincluded a heightened sensibility of common burdens and shared mechanismsfor resistance.

Workers favored the Table revised through the new regime’s elaborateprocess, the “Table of the Revolution.” Tasks were set close to the levels theyhad set in the original 1963 Table, and the document spelled out protective pro-visions such has having union delegates on every plantation and requiring thatemployers sign work cards. However, shortly after the new Table’s implemen-tation, planters demanded yet another reformulation. Mired in a crisis causedby loss of market share and low industrial yields, the planters claimed thatworkers could "nish tasks in half a day and their labor costs were far higher


than their competitors in the south.64 Soon, the GTIA recommended that tasksbe changed in the interest of “stimulating an increase in productivity.” Thegroup suggested the use of incentives—prizes and raises for productiveworkers—as well as penalties for underproduction. By November of 1965, acommittee had been formed to look into various questions having to do withthe cane industry, and the planters succeeded in forcing the adoption of a newTask Table that outlined larger task limits.65

From the Cabo union’s daring strikes to the rewriting of task limits, across adecade and a half of planter intransigence workers struggled to enforce theTable. They faced excessive task sizes, the assignment of desirable work to infor-mal workers lacking work cards (as a disincentive to workers’ seeking legal con-tracts), ineffective regional labor commissioners unwilling to punish planters,and other challenges.66 The rural union federation president complained in1966 that planters were “transforming the system of task work into a meansof escaping the obligation of paying the minimum wage.” Bosses measuredtasks too large for a worker to complete “if he is not helped by some memberof his family.” The union president accused rural producers of lacking thebusiness sense to invest in their workers and instead practicing managementtechniques “condemned over 30 years ago.”67 This last comment emphasizesthe workers’ conception of the Table’s role in a historic battle for better con-ditions and treatment and perhaps "t into a rhetorical strategy of situating them-selves as representing progress and modernity while the planters stood forbackwardness and resistance to change.

Two years later, the federation president remained exasperated and he cir-culated a document titled “Why the Workers Do Not Believe in Tables.” Thepages recounted the history of the agreements from the establishment of the"rst one in 1963 to the state of disrespect he saw in the present day. The broad-side answered planter complaints about some workers "nishing tasks in less thaneight hours, which they always used as an argument for expanding task sizes.The federation said that planters failed to understand the exertion requiredfrom workers seeking to complete their tasks in less time and listed thereasons they expended such effort: to plant their own subsistence crops, tomake time for earning extra money, to help or spend time with their families.68

In the year the document appeared, only 15 percent of workers in the mill-dominated southern part of the cane zone earned the prescribed daily wage(according to a separate union federation report).69 The government directedplanters to attend to the Table, but complaints the next year revealed continuednegligence among producers.70 One union sent a letter in 1969 to the FederalPolice (no doubt with little effect) complaining that a plantation owner namedAntonio Fernando Sampaio was not obeying the Task Table on his property.The letter contained a brief description of the “Table of the Revolution,”emphasizing that it had been af"rmed by the Regional Labor Inspector.71

When workers asked for the bene"ts due them, planters habitually respondedthat they should go “hunt for their rights” in the courts.72 In some cases, thisactually proved fruitful.


The Task Table in Labor Court

The ETR included plenty of regulations with which planters were disinclined tocomply, from paid holidays through the “thirteenth wage,” paid at the end of theyear. From the moment of the ETR’s passage, and at an accelerated rate afterthe coup, employers severed of"cial employment relationships with increasingnumbers of workers. Union of"cials complaining about the mills hiringworkers and refusing to sign work cards was the tip of the iceberg. TheRegional Labor Tribunal Archive’s holdings for one local labor court in theheart of the most productive part of the sugarcane region contain 3,600 contractrescissions for the year 1965 alone. That number of workers must haveamounted to a large percentage of the total workers in sugarcane for the district.Most "les contain a worker’s thumbprint signaling their acknowledgement ofthe contract termination. Many are blank, meaning the worker did not appearat the court to accept or contest the rescission.73

Most of these "red workers continued to work for the plantations, but theylacked work cards and had to strike short-term agreements with planters orwork with contractors—middlemen between the workers and the planters.Contractors hired workers on a daily basis and sold a work group’s labor to plan-ters.74 By hiring these independent gangs of workers, planters could dispensenot only with their responsibilities toward resident workers, but also withmost of their overseers. Contractors took a cut of an established paymentfrom the planter or mill and distributed the rest among their workers, short-circuiting the state-mandated bene"ts system. This contracted work gangsystem emerged at least as early as the 1930s, but it increased in ubiquity asthe state’s role in labor relations grew and by the 1970s had become routine.A 1972 document produced by FETAPE argues that temporary labor exceededpermanent labor by a wide margin.75

Just as contract work grew in Brazil, the entire world experienced a sharprise in nontraditional or “informal” labor relations in the 1970s, referred to asthe !exibilization of the labor force.76 The larger strategy was pursuedthrough other tactics, depending on the context or industry. In São Paulo’sauto industry during the 1970s, for example, unions accused large "rms of sys-tematically "ring and hiring workers as a means of suppressing wages. The prac-tice probably also helped discourage the emergence of organizing momentumamong workers.77 The term used to describe undocumented workers amongPernambuco’s sugarcane cutters underscored the salience of the state’s vision.Workers without signed cards acquired the label “clandestines” (clandestinos),since they held no legal employment relationship with a planter and were there-fore “hidden” from labor law. The term also implies some form of illegality orextra-legality; this connotation was particularly resonant during a time whenthe dictatorship’s repression had forced some people into living clandestinely.

In the mid-1970s, the issue of clandestine labor came up repeatedly in thecourts, and examining these cases provides another window into the relevanceand role of the Task Table, this time in the realm of enforcing labor law. One


such case involves the Conceição family, which in 1971 moved onto the BoaVista plantation, in a municipality called Nazaré da Mata, when the fatherand husband José was admitted as a tenant.78 Five years later, José took theplanter to the Nazaré da Mata labor court for failure to provide bene"ts, andhe won a judgment that paid him back wages. The next year, in March of1977, José’s wife Severina and their four daughters "led a complaint againstthe Boa Vista plantation with the court. Severina testi"ed that the planter hadretaliated against his “ungrateful” employee by preventing her and their daugh-ters from working. The women claimed they had been "red, and the plantertherefore owed them back bene"ts as well as the indemni"cation due to employ-ees "red without warning. Boa Vista’s lawyer called the case “a scheme withoutprecedent,” explaining that Severina and her daughters helped José in his workand increased his production, but that this did not constitute a labor relationshipbetween the women and the plantation. The women did not have work cardssigned by the plantation, and they had never received any wages directlyfrom the foreman or planter, a fact they admitted.79

The Conceição women occupied increasingly common roles for the caneregion. By 1968, at least 15 percent of "eld workers lacked signed work cards,and that proportion grew as the numbers of dismissals cited above indicate.80

But this case also highlights the speci"c situation of women. Joaquim dosSantos had grown up in the municipality where the Conceiçãos lived, and hesaid his mother had not worked the cane "elds. “In this area of the northerncane zone women didn’t work,” he said. “They did family work, taking careof children and the garden.”81 From a formal standpoint, things had notchanged much between Joaquim’s childhood and the 1960s. A union federationreport from 1968 found that only 8 percent of women in the northern sugar zoneearned their own documented wages. The southern part of the sugar region hada longer tradition of women working, and there, according to the report, aquarter of women had signed cards. But a large proportion of women workedalongside fathers or husbands, without their own direct compensation.82 Thisshared work was common, as the union federation president writing the 1966report had implied when he complained that workers required familymembers to complete tasks.83 What the arrangement meant for Severina andher daughters was that they were “clandestines,” doubly hidden from thestate; not only did they lack work cards, they did not even receive wages directly,as José received all of the pay.

The Boa Vista lawyer probably should have rested his case after citing theConceição women’s lack of a labor relationship and calling witnesses to corro-borate the fact. But he continued, as he put it, “just for the sake of argument.” Ifthe women had had signed work cards, he pointed out, the plantation must nothave "red them because they continued to live on the property. In making thisobservation, the lawyer mixed the logic of patronage and tenantry with the logicof labor law. Residence on a plantation traditionally had been synonymous witha labor relationship (however informal) with the boss. The plantation ownermust not have "red the women because they continued to live on his land,


the lawyer went on, yet they had no signed cards. As such, they were not legalemployees so they must be prohibited from working in the "elds. The mixedlogic of the inherited system of labor and the emergent one caught Severinaand her daughters in a trap. Habitation had once signaled employment, but,according to the ETR, employment must be accompanied by a contract. Thewomen lived on the plantation and therefore had not been dismissed, butthey also lacked contracts and therefore could not work. The local judgesagreed and denied the women’s complaint a month after they had "led it.

On the advice of the union lawyer, the women "led an appeal and won ahearing at the Regional Labor Tribunal (TRT). (Workers who sufferedsimilar treatment but lacked access to a union lawyer likely stood little chanceof pursuing the case without that support.) The case reopened in May, withthe judges focusing on the details of José’s work habits. In his testimony atthe local court, the Boa Vista boss had referred to José’s daily tasks in theplural, though all of the plantation’s witnesses had claimed that José completedjust one task per day. The witnesses also acknowledged that José’s wife anddaughters regularly worked with him. The TRT judges decided that the questionof the women’s labor relationship to Boa Vista revolved around howmuch workwas routinely credited to José, the legal recipient of wages. If his pay stubshowed more than one task for every day but he alone received wages, thejudges argued, that would indicate that the employer was committing fraudbecause tasks were measured as a full day’s work. Essentially, the judges’approach came down to a highly literal application of the Task Table. Eventhough everyone involved knew how much variability existed in practice, theTable stated that any given task is equivalent to an eight-hour day’s work.Therefore, the completion of more than one task in eight hours would implymultiple laborers and therefore multiple employees.84

The Table’s simpli"cation of cane agriculture to a grid of assignments couldnot account for all conditions and situations. However, the TRT judges in thiscase nevertheless used it as a tool for cutting through the exploitative informal-ities of labor in the sugar zone (and perhaps battling the routine exploitation ofassigned tasks too large to be completed in a day). Through careful parsing ofcontradictory witness testimony, the judges decided that José regularly com-pleted more than one task per day. They relied primarily on the boss’s own inad-vertent admission of this fact in their "nal decision, released in July 1977. José’sproduction, the judges said, was clearly made possible by the help of others—inthis case, family members. They then set out to determine the regularity of hisauxiliaries’ service. On the basis of the witnesses’ observations, they ruled thatthree of his daughters had provided labor to the plantation on a consistentenough basis to warrant their classi"cation as employees. Therefore, the plan-ter’s refusal to offer them any more work must be understood as dismissalwithout warning, and they ordered the payment of restitution.85

In his statement at the TRT hearing, the Boa Vista lawyer did not disputethat Severina and her daughters had worked with José. He described the habit-ual use of family labor to augment men’s production as simply a “peculiarity of


work in the cane zone.”86 But precisely these sorts of “peculiarities,” in additionto the personalized relations that the lawyer had referenced in his statement tothe local court, clashed with a regime of labor regulation based on of"cial workcards, state-regulated bene"ts, and a social services system built on clear recordsof work rendered. The state could not “see” work performed by women insupport of male family members and remunerated through payment to themen. The TRT’s July judgment took one small step toward expanding thestate’s vision as it brought three more workers into the realm of regulation.The Task Table facilitated this process, serving the state as a tool for measuringquantities of labor rendered and making judgments on that basis aboutemployee-employer relationships.

Many workers never took complaints to the labor courts, and many ofthose who did make it to court did not receive judgments as favorable asSeverina’s daughters’. But over the course of the 1970s women increasinglyworked for their own wages, even if they rarely had signed work cards. Asnoted above, the union federation found regional differentiation in of"cialemployment for women in the 1960s. A comparison of labor court cases fromtwo sample municipalities in the northern and southern parts of the regionfrom 1977 shows a similar divergence, with women accounting for 13 percentof the northern cases but nearly half in the south.87 This pattern re!ects a differ-ent pace of agricultural development, but in both areas women’s documentedlabor was on the rise. Interviews I did in 2003 con"rmed rising women’s involve-ment with the unions in the 1970s and 1980s.88 This increasing formalizationworked in tandem with the same conditions that made the Task Table’s emer-gence and continued relevance possible.

Conclusion

Dr. Gerson Bastos, a sugarcane agronomist at the Federal Rural University ofPernambuco, said the changes that took place in the sugar region during the1970s were like a “light turning on in the countryside.”89 The sharply increasedpresence of the state under the military regime—guiding industrial expansion,attempting to regulate the agricultural environment, and setting the rules forthe labor bargain—directed the glare of state intervention on a region thathad for so long existed in the shadows of patronage and individualized domina-tion. The military revolutionized export agriculture and arrogated to itselfcontrol over labor relationships. This process and the tools and institutionsthat facilitated it, including labor courts and unions and the Task Table, hadunusual results. Though the state introduced a new power dynamic into anarea of entrenched traditions, it did not simply supplant the domination ofbosses. One scholar has argued that the state “recuperated certain battle stan-dards of the pre-coup unions … and transformed them into its language inorder to return them to the workers in a paternalistic form.”90 This is partlytrue; certainly workers looked to the state, through their unions, for retirementbene"ts and medical care, rather than looking to their employers for patronage.


But in conforming themselves to the organized, regimented group described bythe law, and using the spaces left open to them by the state, workers also beganto recognize themselves as a group with shared interests—or a class.

The workers’ consciousness played an emphatic role in the organization ofa region-wide strike in 1979—the "rst in more than a decade—that resulted in awage increase, recognition of plantation-level union delegates, and reprioritiza-tion of the Task Table. In preparing for the strike, workers attended meticu-lously to the letter of the state’s repressive law, their skills and savvy honedby years in the labor courts. They took their memories of the Accord that pro-duced the Task Table to the negotiating table with producers and came out withgenerous new contract terms. This set of events surprised the government. Butin increasing the legibility of workers through institutions like the labor courts,the state not only enhanced its ability to surveil and control, it also helped fostera sense of shared grievances and concerns. The closed, subjugated world of theplantations was pried open by the Task Table, the unions, and the labor courts,and even when these were managed by a repressive state they offered workersmarginal space to mobilize.91 The Task Table—still a product of negotiationbetween planters, workers, and the state—remains a crucial tool for workersto protect themselves in the "elds. “If you don’t have a Task Table,” Santossaid in his 2003 interview, “you don’t have anything.”92

NOTES

I give warm thanks to the participants in the 2011 Toronto Brazilian HistoryWorkshop, mycolleagues Elena Conis, Julia Bullock, and AnaPatricia Garcia, and the two ILWCH reviewersfor thoughtful and constructive feedback.

1. JoaquimManuel dos Santos (a pseudonym), interviews with the author, tape recordings,Vicência, Pernambuco, March 21 and March 27, 2003.

2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the HumanCondition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998), 22–25.

3. Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. R. Szreter (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 29.4. André João Antonil, Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (São Paulo

1923 [1711]), 109.5. Affonso Varzea,Geografía de Açúcar, no Leste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1943), 261–63.6. Armando Souto Maior, Quebra-quilos: lutas sociais no outono do império (São Paulo,

1978), 16, 92–169.7. MaxWeber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Mineola, NY, 2003). Kula,

Measures, 24–28.8. Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the

Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, trans. James H. Membrez (New York 2006), 338–46; 352.9. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present

38 (1967): 78.10. Sidney Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New Haven, CT,

1960), 136.11. Moacir Palmeira, “The Aftermath of Peasant Mobilization: Rural Con!icts in the

Brazilian Northeast since 1964,” in The Structure of Brazilian Development, ed. NeumaAguiar (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), 82. The vara, in fact, is so linguistically imbedded as aform of measurement (though fairly recently according to the Dicionário Houaiss) that inaddition to meaning rod, staff, cane, or pole, actually can be used to mean simply a system ofmeasurement. Instituto Antônio Houaiss, Dicionário Houaiss (Rio de Janeiro, 2001), 2829.


12. Antônio Augusto B. Junqueira and Bento Dantas. “A cana-de-açúcar no Brasil,” inCultura e adubação de cana-de-açúcar, ed. E. Malavolta et al. (São Paulo, 1964), 38.

13. Manuel Diégues Júnior, População e Açúcar no Nordeste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro,1954), 128. Diégues Júnior also noted that the conta was known in some areas of the Northeastas the “ticuca.” Sigaud, “A Percepção do Salário entre Trabalhadores Rurais no Nordeste doBrasil,” in Actes du XLIIe Congrès International des Américanistes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1976), 321.

14. Severino José da Silva, interview with the author, tape recording, Vicência, April 1, 2004.15. In his study of mill workers, José Sérgio Leite Lopes also heard plenty of testimony

from rural workers about the manipulation of task size and remuneration. Leite Lopes, Ovapor do Diabo: o trabalho dos operários do açúcar (Rio de Janeiro, 1976), 165.

16. Lygia Sigaud, “The Idealization of the Past in a Plantation Area: The Northeast ofBrazil,” in Ideology and Social Change in Latin America, vol. I: Emergence of WorkerConsciousness, eds. June Nash and Juan Corradi (New York, 1975), 181. Sigaud, “APercepção do Salário,” 318–20.

17. James A. Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British CoalIndustry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge, 1991), 1.

18. Gavin Wright, “Slavery and American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History 77(2003): 531. Wright refers to “individual task systems approximating piecework” on NewWorld plantations.

19. Richard Price, Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise ofLabour, 1830–914 (Cambridge, 1980), 37–38.

20. Mário Lacerda de Melo, “Problemas agrícolas e industriais do açúcar emPernambuco,” Brasil Açucareiro 28 (1946): 51.

21. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica andBritain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 41, 126.

22. Telmo Frederico do Rêgo Maciel, Nível de Vida do Trabalhador Rural da Zona daMata—1961 (Recife: IJNPS, 1964), 36–38, 50; FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico dostrabalhadores rurais (Recife: FETAPE, CONTAG, SORPE, 1968), 47.

23. Pedro Eugênio Toledo Cabral, “Oprocesso de proletarianização do trabalhador canai-viero de Pernambuco,” Revista Pernambucana de Desenvolvimento 11 (1984/1986): 170–71. Theerosion of tenantry and the shifting norms for access to land and houses on plantations has beenwell documented and studied. For a speci"c example of workers resisting a new charge forhousing in 1954, see September 14, 1954, report from the Delegacia de Polícia do Municípiode Amarají to Coronel Secretario da Segurança Pública, in SSP 793: Indústria Luis DubeuxS/A (Usina União e Indústria e Re"naria Bom"m), Arquivo Público do Estado dePernambuco (hereafter APE).

24. Alexandre Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, Problemas econômicos e sociais da lavoura cana-vieira, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1943). Elide Rugai Bastos, As Ligas Camponesas (Petrópolis,1984), 58.

25. British historian James Jaffe suggests that unions often emerged to challenge theimplementation of piece rate payment systems. Jaffe, Market Power, introduction.

26. José Arlindo Soares,A frente do Recife e o governo do Arraes: Nacionalismo em crise—1955/1964 (Rio de Janeiro, 1982).

27. John D. French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Con"ict and Alliances in ModernSão Paulo (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), 35–36. Cliff Welch, The Seed Was Planted: The São PauloRoots of Brazil’s Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964 (University Park, PA 1999), 297–300.

28. “Usineiros e Trabalhadores Debatem Uniformização de Tarefas no Campo,”Diário dePernambuco, June 29–30, 1963, 3.

29. It is overwhelmingly likely that the count was actually measured in braças. But as notedabove, “count” traditionally was used as a synonym for “measure,” of whatever sort.

30. “Polícia de Catende ausentou-se, mas camponeses ordeiros frustraram as agitações em‘Roçadinho’,” Diário de Pernambuco, July 12 1963, 3.

31. A collection of David Montgomery’s insightful analyses of these issues in earlytwentieth-century US is Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work,Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1983). Especially relevant are Chapters 1–3.

32. Holt, Problem of Freedom, 148.33. Scott Cook, Peasant Capitalist Industry: Piecework and Enterprise in SouthernMexican

Brickyards (Lanham, MD, 1984), 126. The worker did frankly acknowledge that piece ratesencouraged competition with other workers.


34. Gregório Bezerra, Memórias, segunda parte: 1946–1969 (Rio de Janeiro: EditoraCivilização Brasileira, 1980), 178. Manuel Correia de Andradae, Área do sistema canavieiro,SUDENE Estudos Regionais No 18 (Recife: SUDENE/PSU/SRE, 1988), 224.

35. The Diário printed the "nal agreement, which is in a secret police clipping "le on therural union federation: “Proposta Conjunta das Tabelas das Tarefas do Campo,” in Documentosde Segurança Social e Política (hereafter SSP) 28688: Federação dos Trabalhadores Rurais dePernambuco, APE.

36. “Proposta conjunta…” in SSP 28688: Federação de Trabalhadores Rurais dePernambuco, APE.

37. Welch, The Seed Was Planted, 215.38. Welch, The Seed Was Planted, 215. Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible:

The Brazilian Rural Workers’ Trade Union Movement, 1964–1985 (Philadelphia, PA, 1994), 39.39. Bezerra, Memórias, 178.40. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, “Valentia e cultura do trabalho na estiva de Santos,” in

Culturas de classe: Identidade e diversidade na formação do operariado, eds. Claudio H. M.Batalha, Fernando Teixeira da Silva, and Alexandre Fortes (Campinas, 2004), 208, 234.Another example of struggle over this principle comes from nineteenth-century Britishmasons who battled employers’ attempts at labor regulation, arguing that the struggle boileddown to whether “we are to be treated like beasts of burdens or … as moral and intellectualbeings.” Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 37–38.

41. Thompson, “Time,” 85.42. I cite Thompson without wishing to imply that England’s industrial revolution estab-

lished a model for the trajectory of labor relations elsewhere in the world. I "nd the observationcompelling because it so aptly describes the case in Pernambuco, but I recognize that thelocation- and context-speci"c paths to these points differed. Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly cri-tiques Thompson for declaring that capitalism will inevitably bring time-discipline to the devel-oping world. Of course, capitalism operates within history and does not create its owninexorable temporality. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought andHistorical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 48.

43. For my description of the elite vision of the plantation landscape, see Thomas D.Rogers, “Laboring Landscapes: The Environmental, Racial, and Class Worldview ofthe Brazilian Northeast’s Sugar Elite, 1880s–1930s,” Luso-Brazilian Review 46 (2009): 22–53.

44. “Proposta Conjunta das Tabelas das Tarefas do Campo,” op cit.45. Ronivaldo Nascimento, interview with the author, tape recording, Engenho Humaitá,

Palmares, January 25, 2003.46. March 7, 1966, letter from Agápito Francisco Santos to Delegado Regional do

Trabalho, in SSP 1606: Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço da Mata, APE.47. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos and Severino José da Silva, interviews, op cit.48. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11–25.49. 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 quanti"cation and measure-ment. In the speci"c case of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, he describes the double-edged quality of statistics and maps, which could both help and constrain populargroups. Michael A. Ervin, “Statistics, Maps, and Legibility: Negotiating Nationalism inPost-Revolutionary Mexico,” The Americas 66 (2009): 156.

50. The nineteenth-century British masons Richard Price studied also soughtarrangements with employers that would limit their work. Their solutions ranged from“relatively simple statements of hours and wages to complex and detailed exegeseswhich minutely regulated the conditions under which the work was to be done.” In allcases, the agreements included restrictions on piecework. Price, Masters, Unions andMen, 90.

51. Simon Rottenberg, “Negotiated Wage Payments in British West Indian Agriculture,”Journal of Farm Economics 33 (1951): 403.

52. See Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America.53. Scott notes the frailty of simplifying instruments in the face of reality’s complexity.

Even as authoritarian states rely on them, he writes, they undermine those states’ projects byfailing to account for the messiness of social and environmental dynamism. Scott, SeeingLike a State, 77, 80, 82, 89, 95, 262.


54. “Paro Totalmente Atividade dos Trabalhadores da Cana,” Diário de Pernambuco,November 20 1963, 3. Bezerra, Memórias, 175–179. Joseph A. Page, The Revolution thatNever Was: Northeast Brazil, 1955–1964 (New York, 1972), 166–69.

55. The New York Times contributed to the mood with articles bearing headlines like“Northeast Brazil Poverty Breeds Threat of a Revolt” and “Marxists Are OrganizingPeasants in Brazil.” Tad Szulc, “Northeast Brazil Poverty Breeds Threat of a Revolt,”New York Times, October 31, 1960; Szulc, “Marxists Are Organizing Peasants in Brazil,”New York Times, November 1, 1960.

56. “Porque os Trabalhadores Rurais não Acreditam em Tabelas,” !yer dated October 28,1968, in SSP 1352: CONTAG, APE.

57. Correia de Andrade, Área do Sistema Canavieiro, 390–391. Bento Dantas and Lúciodos Santos e Silva, Subsídios para o programa de desenvolvimento sustentável da zona damata (Recife, 1995), 72. Manuel Correia de Andrade, Modernização e pobreza: a expansãoda agronindústria canavieira e seu impacto ecológico e social (São Paulo, 1994), 42, 173.

58. Scott argues that the operative temporality of high modernist regimes is the future, soplanning becomes a scienti"c process endowed with great prestige and importance. Scott,Seeing Like a State, 95–96.

59. “Contrato Coletivo de Trabalho, na Lavoura Canavieira de Pernambuco,” in SSP28688: Federação dos Trabalhadores Rurais de Pernambuco, APE.

60. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 19. Many scholars agree that after a periodof harsh repression, the military government deliberately allowed the union movement tooperate. See versions of this argument in Anthony Pereira, The End of the Peasantry: TheRural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1997);Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible; and Peter Houtzager, “State and Unions in theTransformation of the Brazilian Countryside, 1964–1979,” Latin American Research Review33 (1998): 106–108.

61. Mauro Guilherme Pinheiro Koury, “Movimentos sociais no campo (estudos),” Textode Debate 9 (1986): 19–46; “DRT Considera Ilegal Greve do Cabo e Adverte que DecretaráIntervenção,” Diário da Noite, September 17, 1968. The Cabo union might have felt safe orga-nizing a strike because of its relationship to Father Melo, a priest involved in the rural labormovement who had cultivated a relationship with the military regime.

62. Quoted in John French,Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 175.

63. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 87.64. The Northeast’s market share was dropping even as the federal government was pur-

suing a “Plan for the Expansion of the National Sugar Industry.” Correia de Andrade,Modernização e pobreza, 173. Bento Dantas, A agroindústria canavieira de Pernambuco: asraízes históricas dos seus problemas, sua situação atual e suas perspectivas (Recife, 1971), 36–38. Dantas and Silva, Subsídios para o Programa de Desenvolvimento, 17.

65. “Recomendações para a política açucareira do Nordeste,” Brasil Açucareiro 65 (1965):12–13. “Comissão para o Trabalho,” Brasil Açucareiro 66 (1965): 14.

66. Union President Agápito Francisco Santos letter to Regional Labor Commissioner,March 7 1966, in SSP 1606: Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço daMata, APE.

67. “Exmo. Sr. Ministro do Trabalho e da Previdência Social,” November 4, 1966, in SSP31,496: Federação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura de Pernambuco (VI), APE.

68. “Porque os Trabalhadores Rurais não Acreditam em Tabelas,” op. cit. Letter fromRural Workers Union of Rio Formoso, September 10, 1968, in SSP 1634: Sindicato dosTrabalhadores Rurais de Rio Formoso, APE.

69. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 44.70. Letter to Polícia Federal from rural union of São Lourenço da Mata, November 26,

1969, in SSP 1606: Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço da Mata, APE.71. November 26, 1969, letter from São Lourenço da Mata union to Departamento de

Polícia Federal, in SSP 1606, op cit.72. Lygia Sigaud, Os Clandestinos e os Direitos: Estudo sobre Trabalhadores da

Cana-de-Açucar de Pernambuco (São Paulo, 1979), 90, 97.73. Junta de Conciliação e Julgamento (hereafter JCJ), Palmares 1965–1966, Arquivo do

Tribunal Regional do Trabalho (hereafter A-TRT).74. See Termo de Reclamação 86/63, JCJ Nazaré da Mata, A-TRT for an example of

contractor-planter agreements, as spelled out in court testimony.


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. Atthat scale, temporary workers outnumber contracted workers by 6,800,000 to 1,200,000.

76. Arne L. Kalleberg, “Nonstandard Employment Relations: Part-Time, Temporary andContract Work,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 341–65.

77. John Humphrey, Capitalist Control and Workers’ Struggle in the Brazilian AutoIndustry (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 87.

78. I have called attention to the importance of this case’s implications elsewhere: Rogers,Deepest Wounds, 169–170; Thomas D. Rogers and Christine Dabat, “‘A Peculiarity of Labor inthis Region’: Workers’ Voices in the Labor Court Archive at the Federal University ofPernambuco,” Latin American Research Review 47, special issue (2012): 163–78. While itoffers a particularly clear example of the Table’s application, my colleague Dabat and I haveresearched similar cases in Nazaré da Mata and other municipalities, and in our article wenote a good deal of other scholarship using the cases.

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 567/77.87. Thomas D. Rogers, “Making Class Consciousness under a Repressive State: Rural

Unions in 1970s Brazil.” Paper for “Class Analysis and the Politics of the People:Investigations in a Post-Colonial Mode,” conference at Emory University, November 22–23,2013.

88. Irací, interview with the author, tape recording, Vicência, March 7 and March 27. Iracíwas secretary of the rural union of Vicência, an elected position.

89. Gerson Quirino Bastos, interview with the author, handwritten notes, Recife, March25, 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. JoaquimManuel dos Santos, interviewwith the author, tape recording,Murupé,March

27, 2003.


Taking the Measure of Labor: Rural Rationalization in Twentieth-Century Brazil

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