Ineradicable social inequalities: the precarious formalisation of work in the sugarcane agroindustry of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil (1990s-2010s)

• Ano de defesa: 2025
• Autor(a) principal: Queiroz, Allan Souza
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: sociologia; Desigualdade social; Indústria açucareira; Trabalhador rural; Alagoas
• Link de acesso: https://app.uff.br/riuff/handle/1/40513

This dissertation examines the growth of formal employment in the sugarcane agro-industry of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil, between the 1990s and the 2010s. This study adopts a critical perspective that departs from statistical approaches and instead delves deeper into the social and historical context of the emergence of the formal labour market in the plantationdominated region of Alagoas. The guiding research question is: Does the shift from informal to formal jobs mean that better and more secure jobs are created for workers? The aim of this study is to unpack the restructuring of the labour market and explain why and how formalisation has brought new forms of precarity and social inequalities. The study uses a qualitative approach based on oral-history, in-depth and semi-structured interviews, workplace ethnography and photography to create new primary sources on the formalisation of jobs. The analysis shed light on the emerging patterns of employment, the institutional mechanisms that reproduce these patterns through documents, the dynamics of coercion and resistance in the workplace, and the reproduction of a diverse rural proletariat beyond formal precarious wage work. It is demonstrated that job formalisation actualised old forms of social control previously based on informality and other systems of labour immobilisation and exploitation. The findings point to the precarity associated with workers having jobs ‘for life’ characterised by seasonality and work intensification. The expansion of formal employment has been used to raise work effort and reproduce a specific form of workforce who is seasonally discarded by this labour market, experiencing recurrent unemployment, and perpetually dependent on unemployment benefits and accident benefits for these workers are continuously exposed to occupational hazards and joblessness. Moreover, the workers’ documents, the carteiras de trabalho became ambiguous instruments. While these documents promoted labour and social rights, they were instrumentalised to allow employers greater control and immobilisation of the workforce. Labour control was reinforced by unofficial modifications to work cards and the arbitrariness of managers, who used punishments, threats and coercive measures to extract labour and control workers. The disregard for human and labour rights indicates that coercion remains a resilient feature in the exploitation of workers on the plantations. The workers' reactions to the intensification of exploitation play a crucial role in the formalisation of work. Looking at work histories, the period of job formalisation expands beyond formal wage labour and shows the interplay of visible (formal, paid) and invisible (informal, unpaid) forms of work that constitute the rural proletariat in the Zona da Mata of Alagoas. These different forms of 258 proletarianisation point to different patterns of precarity and labour exploitation. For most workers, formalisation has led to permanently temporary employment. Other workers have experienced long periods of informality and very short periods of formalisation. Still other workers have never really had access to formal contracts and have worked under informal conditions their entire working lives. Women form the unpaid segment of the rural proletariat who perform reproductive labour and whose indispensable work is made invisible. Others have had to escape gruelling working conditions by refusing formal jobs in order to survive or in search of upward mobility and a better future. Finally, this study concludes that formalizing jobs has not been sufficient to promote decent work and decent living conditions, as the extension of social and labour rights on plantations is accompanied by life-threatening work intensification, socio-economic insecurities, repression and coercion. There is an urgent need to move away from formalised precarious wage labour on sugarcane plantations and to expand autonomous forms of work that combat landlessness and labour exploitation. The peasant perspective and the strengthening of agrarian reform is proposed as a viable option to promote sustainable production relations that are more centred on human flourishing, and oriented towards agroecology, food sovereignty, biodiversity conservation and the symbiotic interaction between humans and nature that can create a good life in the Zona da Mata of Alagoas.