The Evolution of Measurement in Sugarcane Work

As in most other rural areas around the world, agricultural work in Pernambuco was a hyperlocal affair with remarkable variability in standards and expectations across the region. Around the cane-producing zone, an area about the size of Connecticut, individual planters organized production and directed their workers according to varying norms and standards. These regional quirks persisted deep into the twentieth century despite the fact that sugar had been produced at a large scale and for export to far-flung destinations for hundreds of years. Sugar exports from the Brazilian Northeast to Lisbon had begun in the first half of the sixteenth century, and cane farming continued uninterrupted through Brazilian independence and the Imperial period, weathering stiff competition across the centuries from Antillean producers and European sugar beet planters, not to mention sugarcane growers in other parts of Brazil. In its localism, Pernambuco's sugarcane industry did not differ from most of its competitors. Precapitalist and agrarian economies overwhelmingly depended on local units and idiosyncratic measurement systems, often tied to human anatomy like a forearm, a hand, a thumb.Footnote ² For measuring land areas, most parts of the world up through the nineteenth century tended to cleave to one of two approaches, gauging either by labor time or by the amount of seed required for planting. So a farmer might refer to two harvest days' worth of wheat, or he might say that he had planted two bushels of land, if that was the amount of seed he had used.Footnote ³

In Pernambuco, most sugarcane farmers measured land according to a unit called a “task” (tarefa), a measure related to labor, though in this case the mill's, not the cane cutter's. The task was an areal estimate of standing cane that would satisfy a mill for a single day of grinding. A keenly observant Jesuit who wrote a manual for new plantation owners in the 1690s advised, “Planting a task of canes is the same as planting a space of thirty square arms (braças) of land.”Footnote ⁴ We will get to braças soon, but the Jesuit's gesture toward regularization of the task foundered in the face of local preferences. Two and a half centuries later, a geographer traveling around the sugar-producing Northeast found little agreement on the size of a task. Affonso Várzea wrote in Geography of Sugar (Geografia de açúcar) that planters gave him figures for the unit that ranged from 3000 all the way to 4400 square meters.Footnote ⁵ Despite its variability, the task persisted into the 1950s as a unit for expressing areas of land. As a function of a day's worth of work at the mill, the task had an oblique relationship to labor, but in the middle of the twentieth century it began to be used in a different sense, as a more direct measurement of work assignments. Agricultural practices lent themselves to overlapping and blurred measurements of work and of space or volume (as in amounts of grain or fruit harvested).

Customary, local measurement systems were woven into social relations and shaped lived experience; their disruption implied serious upheaval in communities. When Brazil's Imperial government attempted to impose the metric system in 1874 and 1875, revolts broke out in the Northeast, including Pernambuco. Rural people burned tax and population records, protested military impressment, and violently expressed their frustration with a time of economic depression. The upheaval became known as the Kilogram-Breaker Revolt (Revolta do Quebra-quilos), a name that emphasized the trigger for the popular anger. Over the year and a half of sporadic violence that spread across four provinces, crowds repeatedly destroyed weights and measures in market towns. Far-flung subsistence farmers, ranch hands, and small town dwellers feared fraud at the hands of the unfamiliar new measurements. They discerned a malignant relationship between this imposition and potential taxation from a distant and unfriendly government, and they wanted to protect local control over their own affairs. Even worse, the Imperial government charged towns taxes on the measurement utensils themselves, since it cost money to manufacture the precisely calibrated weights and boxes (the latter for volume measurements). So rural crowds lashed out at the concrete manifestations of change, breaking or stealing the new weights in market towns.Footnote ⁶

Spasms of opposition to regularization speak to anxieties associated with modernization and what Max Weber called rationalization, the gradual elimination of local specificity by national standards (and even supranational ones, in the case of the metric or “French” system) that facilitate the operation of markets and the functioning of the state.Footnote ⁷ These transitions generally accompany agricultural modernization, meaning the adoption of more efficient techniques (such as the abandonment of field fallowing in favor of the routine use of fertilizers) and the systematic integration into broader market circuits. Changes in agricultural and industrial production frequently proceed in tandem. Indeed, the industrial revolution developed in concert with the agricultural revolution; the two depended on and fed one another.Footnote ⁸ It stands to reason that rural and industrial labor modes would have much in common. In his classic study of modern “time-discipline's” emergence, E. P. Thompson concerns himself primarily with how the proliferation of clocks and timed labor tasks affected tradesmen and craftspeople and early industrial laborers. But he also noted that “enclosure and agricultural improvement were both, in some sense, concerned with the efficient husbandry of the time of the labor-force.”Footnote ⁹ Field workers, too, had to contend with large landowners approaching labor exploitation in new ways.

Working people's experiences unfolded on the bleeding edge of the border between measurements of labor and measurements of space and weight. Even when workers do not greet change with violent resistance, they can influence the process of introducing and regulating new units. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz learned this in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, when the subject of his classic ethnography Worker in the Cane related details about the work of cane-holing. This job consists of digging holes to drop in small pieces of sugarcane, which eventually grow into a field of new-growth cane; workers generally had large areas to complete in a day. Instructed to use a measuring stick for maintaining a precise distance between each hole, workers would obediently measure when the foreman was around but in his absence would throw the stick aside and measure out the holes 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 fly.Footnote ¹⁰ Taso zeroes in here on an area of constant conflict between workers and managers, which is the question of efficiency and time. The fact is that the two groups frequently have very different definitions and priorities for both.

In Brazil, from the abolition of slavery in 1888, sugarcane workers generally lived on the plantations, their wages complemented by a tenantry arrangement granting them access to land for a garden plot. Administrators and foremen managed work gangs on an ad hoc basis, with workers receiving daily wages. (Actually, workers operated on the notional promise of daily wages even as they frequently suffered without regular pay.) In the second quarter of the twentieth century, management moved slowly toward spatial tasks paid according to areal units completed and fewer workers received wages based purely on their working a set number of hours during the day. The “count” (conta) appeared in this context, a unit meant to approximate one day's work. Foremen measured out the counts with long wooden or iron rods that they carried with them as they rode horseback through the fields, like slave overseers before them. Called varas, these rods with hooks at the end came to serve as the designated tools for measuring out another old unit with a long history, a braça (from braço, or arm, exemplifying the anatomical links of so many measures). The braça eventually stabilized at 2.2 meters and became the standard unit for measuring counts.Footnote ¹¹ The count began to spread in the 1920s and 1930s and by the mid-1940s was employed by planters throughout the sugarcane region. Its proliferation accompanied a major shift in production as large-capacity mills spread and engulfed smaller plantations. The greater capacity of these mills, in turn, drove up sugar production. Count areas fluctuated according to the nature of the job required, and remuneration depended on the established wage of a given location or property.

This new system of field work emerged in the context of an increased scale and 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 feed the new mills. The expansion was fueled by state-supported research, the adoption of new cane varieties, and increased fertilizer use.Footnote ¹² Planters argued that they needed to streamline their processes and introduce efficiencies in their workforce. The “count” ended up as an intermediate step in that direction. It still linked payment to the notion of a generic day of labor, but planters gradually altered their approach, increasingly assigning tasks in such a way that the pace could be increased by adjusting measurements, or payment rates adjusted based on production. This shift led some planters toward the use of a larger measure, intended to occupy a worker for more than one day: the task.Footnote ¹³ With the advent of the task—a new use of the term, distinguished from the older idea of a day's worth of milling—a day's labor rarely equated to the completion of a particular spatial quantum of labor. Workers could not finish a task in a day, so they were tied to a particular site for longer and their payday was delayed.

Field workers also found themselves captive to the measurements dictated by foremen who had incentives to push the boundaries of task sizes. Workers from the cane zone still remember the punitive assignment of tasks from the 1950s. 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 boss wanted; 12 [braças] by 13, 15 by 15. Anything.” Da Silva began cutting cane in 1947 as a nine-year-old, and he remembered that the more cane a worker would cut, the more the foreman demanded.Footnote ¹⁴ Switching the payment scheme from time to space by eliminating daily pay and introducing task wages, planters rationalized the work process, introducing incentive structures and trying to ensure higher levels of productivity. While it may have been more “rational,” the system clearly skewed in favor of the bosses, who could reduce payment amounts, or eliminate them entirely, according to a highly subjective (and not disinterested) decision about whether or not the work was “well done.”Footnote ¹⁵ According to the anthropologist Lygia Sigaud, after a worker completed a task, the plantation inspector (a step above a foreman) would study the work done, almost always reducing the worker's wages because of allegedly poor work.Footnote ¹⁶

One way to describe the proliferation of measured jobs in the fields, whether through “counts,” “tasks,” or anything else, is through the emergence of piecework in the sugarcane region. Such a development is largely unremarkable for an (agro) industry in expansion, as the sugarcane sector was at the time. Rural piecework has received far less attention among sociologists and historians than has its counterpart in industrial settings, though studies of wage systems in general and particularly the growth of and negotiation of piece rates are surprisingly scarce.Footnote ¹⁷ Industrial Revolution-era England likely witnessed the first widespread emergence of piecework, unless we consider certain types of slave labor organization.Footnote ¹⁸ British historian Richard Price writes that the acceleration of building projects with industrialization brought the first attempts to impose piecework in the building trades. Builders and masons, in particular, repeatedly mounted strikes opposing the practice throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Price recounts a struggle by railroad workers in 1837 against a “tyrannical” foreman, whose “predilection for piecework was notorious; by some he was even credited with inventing the system.” He employed what would become a classic method, urging a strong worker toward a particular goal and then setting his performance as the standard for all to meet.Footnote ¹⁹ This technique, called “chasing,” was essentially the same as what Da Silva described when he mentioned the exigent foremen of his youth.

Planters and supporters of sugarcane agriculture encountered frustrations during the introduction of piecework just as their peers in industry had to fine-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 had before by completing multiple “counts” in a day. But instead of “improving themselves” by working hard and accumulating money, he said they worked less. The comparatively new remuneration scheme created “opportunities for laziness,” he argued, and a false labor scarcity.Footnote ²⁰ His analysis sounds uncannily like the arguments of liberal reformers seeking to yank “backward” populations into modern, liberal, capitalistic society, whether in industrializing societies or Caribbean colonies after the abolition of slavery. Those cases, in fact, reinforced one another and exhibited common patterns. Thomas Holt argues that the British used “the centuries-old process of ‘liberating’ their own rural workforce” as their model for molding a docile and hardworking population of ex-slaves in the colonies. Not surprisingly, part of the approach included moving workers gradually from daily wages to task work.Footnote ²¹ The sequence of changes Pernambuco'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 century earlier, chafed against the difficulties of the new forms of labor management in the fields. They also reacted angrily to planters' modifications of tenantry arrangements, another echo of postabolition experiences in the Caribbean and similar processes elsewhere in Latin America. Opening or restricting access 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 institute found that well over half of the rural workers still had access to land for subsistence 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 to use it.Footnote ²² The expanding sugar fields displaced workers, since the crop both occupied land and demanded more labor for cultivation and harvest, denying workers the time to manage garden plots.Footnote ²³ As early as the 1940s, federal officials saw in the changes faced by the sugarcane workers a clear threat to rural peace, and they worried about an “exodus” of workers from countryside to city. A 1941 federal law called the Sugarcane Agriculture Statute (Estatuto da Lavoura Canavieira, ELC) mandated that workers resident on a plantation for more than one year receive access to land close to their houses and of a size large enough to provide their families with food. But in practice, few planters obeyed this prescription.Footnote ²⁴

Just as the spread of the “task” can be abstracted as the rise of piecework and an aspect of agricultural rationalization, we can describe the combination of piecework and the erosion of patronage norms surrounding traditional tenantry as the proletarianization of the sugarcane work force. This did not take place quickly, and indeed one could debate whether it has ever reached completion. But it generated clear effects in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ Pernambuco's sugarcane workers roughly followed this pattern, though their initial organizing efforts took other forms. Industrial workers in Brazil gained legal recognition for unions starting in the 1930s, but rural workers were denied such state sanction and protection even though labor legislation was ambiguous on the subject. Formal organization in the sugarcane region began at its periphery among smallholders and farmers. Starting in 1955, groups from these border municipalities formed organizations called Peasant Leagues (Ligas Camponesas) and congregated under the leadership of a lawyer named Francisco Julião. At the same time, leftist political activists from the state capital Recife, which lies in the middle of the sugarcane zone, built an electoral coalition to support left-leaning local and statewide candidates. They actively campaigned among the League members and reached out to cane workers as well, successfully electing their candidates to the state governorship and Recife mayoralty in 1958 and 1962.Footnote ²⁶

At the beginning of the 1960s, a rural unionization movement joined the Peasant Leagues. And finally rural workers around the country gained legal recognition of unions with the passage of the Rural Labor Statute (Estatuto do Trabalhador Rural, ETR) in June of 1963. What the shift in labor law had done for urban workers in the 1930s and the ETR did for rural workers entailed the establishment of a state structure for recognizing and supporting a single union in a given industry. This corporatist approach to organized labor links unions directly to the state via the Labor Ministry, with intermediate figures such as regional labor delegates whose presence enforces the tight linkage between state bureaucracy and the workers' organizations. State support for workers flows downward through the unions, including social services and benefits such as pensions.Footnote ²⁷ State action toward unions varied depending on the type of regime in power, but its presence was always strong.

At precisely the same time that the ETR passed, Pernambuco experienced a particularly tumultuous month, with the unionization movement accelerating in response to the new legislation. Miguel Arraes, the governor elected in 1962 by the socialist coalition, encouraged the workers, and they began using small-scale strikes to push for higher wages and better conditions. At the end of the month, the new unions sent representatives to Recife to meet with plantation and sugar mill owners. Arraes mediated as the workers and bosses discussed payment practices in the sugar fields, grappling with fundamental questions about the list of tasks that comprised modern cane agriculture and how to measure assignments for each job. Rooted in these specifics, the workers and employers' discussion was animated by questions of flexibility, control, efficiency, productivity, and protection from exploitation.Footnote ²⁸

Before the discussions had reached their conclusion, a strike by field workers at the Roçadinho sugar mill provided an example of workers' discontent with the task-based payment schemes. The governor who had served from 1958 to 1962 owned the Roçadinho Mill, so Recife's main daily newspaper gave the strike prominent coverage. The reporter on the scene clearly did not sympathize with the workers, and he made the curious claim that the “pretext for the strike was to demand a lower salary.” Work at Roçadinho was based on tasks measured out in braças. Foremen assigned tasks of 625 square braças, the reporter explained, paid at a rate of 2000 cruzeiros. Since a worker could complete a task in two or three days, the reporter calculated, he should earn 600 to 700 cruzeiros a day. But the strikers' central demand was a return to payments based on the count. (The reporter erroneously described these as more or less ten square meters, depending on the terrain.Footnote ²⁹ ) Generally, workers completing counts earned 500 cruzeiros a day. “One sees, by the numbers,” the author concluded, “that the strikers ‘demand’ the reduction of their salaries from 700 and even 800 cruzeiros to 500 a day.”Footnote ³⁰

The reporter's sarcasm indicates that he had not fully understood the workers' aims. First, his estimates of wages by the “task” may have overestimated the system's transparency. While Roçadinho workers may have had the opportunity to earn the wages he calculated, in practice they likely did not. Tasks were too vague, too easily manipulated by foremen who would inflate their measurements or refuse to approve the workers' progress. Second, the workers probably prioritized control of their work rhythm over the potential for higher wages; they could more easily achieve control by taking jobs measured for completion in a single day. Working by the “count” would have maximized their flexibility and their options, opening room to balance wage work with subsistence farming, for instance. They likely valued this measure of control over the dispensation of their labor more highly than they valued marginal wage increases.Footnote ³¹ Holt provides a similar theory for ex-slave rural workers in Jamaica who hoped to supplement their gardening with occasional plantation wage work. According to his analysis, they prized autonomy over all else.Footnote ³² Similarly, a sociologist studying brick works in Oaxaca in the early 1980s found that workers could choose between daily wages that obligated them to work every weekday or piece wages, which they could earn by working whenever 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.”Footnote ³³

The Roçadinho strike and the general push for control provided the context for the negotiations that Arraes mediated. Both workers and planters wanted to control the timing of work and how it would be measured. Eventually, the groups hammered out an agreement that became known as the “Accord of the Fields.”Footnote ³⁴ They expressed the principles of their bargain in a document: the Task Table. This unified set of standards stipulated norms and expectations for every job in sugarcane agriculture.Footnote ³⁵ The Table outlined, for instance, how much land a worker must clear or weed in a given work day, specifying different amounts depending on the type of terrain the worker faced. Each plantation had to post the Table openly, and foremen were enjoined to measure tasks according to its prescriptions. In subsequent years, rural workers' unions zealously demanded compliance with the Table, even as they faced widespread resistance from planters hoping to squeeze more production from their workers.

The Table established some basic ground rules in the first several clauses of its scant eight pages. The universal measure for cane work in the state was to be the braça of 2.2 meters; a count was ten square braças; and a workday was eight hours. There followed norms for twenty different tasks, from clearing land to harvesting cane—the entire series of jobs required to ready the field, plant and care for the cane, and harvest it and get it to the mill. For each, the amount of work required during an eight-hour day was established. Many of these were measured out in counts, though cane harvesting was measured instead by 20-cane bundles of cut cane. Eight “special rules” followed the work guidelines, including contingencies for disagreements between worker and overseer (for example, over cane being “good to cut” or “sparse”). In those cases, the worker was to simply render eight hours of a work in exchange for the minimum wage (though supervision by a disgruntled foreman following an argument would seem to have its disadvantages). Finally, eleven holidays were specified for recognition by planters.Footnote ³⁶

The Table complemented the new protections brought by the Rural Labor Statute (ETR). In many ways the Statute simply extended to rural areas the same suite of protections that urban workers had long enjoyed and that Getúlio Vargas concretized with the 1943 Consolidation of Labor Laws (Consolidação das leis do trabalho, CLT).Footnote ³⁷ Vargas's attempt to include rural workers with an additional law in 1944 was ineffective and so for another twenty years workers remained under the strict control of rural employers. The ETR required that employers provide workers with work cards, a mode of documenting the labor relationship that helped render sugar workers visible to the state. With a legal, documented employment tie, workers received entitlement to benefits, union membership, and social services. They also had access to labor courts—local labor boards (Juntas de Conciliação e Julgamento, 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).Footnote ³⁸ These courts played crucial roles in the new system of labor relations, becoming privileged forums for conflict between workers and employers, with their own norms and a language that both parties eventually learned to use 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 field. It carried symbolic weight, as a measure won directly from the planters, and it had consequences for relations between workers and their bosses almost as significant as those produced by the ETR. The legendary communist organizer Gregório Bezerra, responsible for unionizing a large percentage of the cane region's workers, called the Table one of the most important conquests of that tumultuous time, on par with the ETR and large-scale unionization.Footnote ³⁹ His passion for the Table recalls the strenuous efforts of port workers in Santos, in the southern state of São Paulo, to achieve control over the pace, organization, and measurement of their work. Fernando Teixeira da Silva analyzes these workers' pride in being “workers without bosses,” by establishing their own hiring methods within the union and incorporating overseers into the union structure. They faced a difficult task, especially in an industry typified by sporadic labor demands, but in 1956 achieved the right to name foremen from within their union.Footnote ⁴⁰ The sugarcane workers fought over the same principle of exerting control, understanding that even with the benefits and protections of the ETR, they faced the capriciousness of planters on the plantations. They needed a mechanism regularizing norms and expectations, something to keep the planters' targets from constantly shifting and to control the inexorable drift of piecework toward increased expectations of worker productivity. In providing the means for that control, something that carried the backing of the state, the Table contributed to a shift in the dynamics of power on the plantations.

In some respects the Table was unremarkable; it simply tabulated individual jobs with benchmarks for production within a given workday. It also clearly accepted the normative standing of task-based labor, or piecework. In this, it parallels the concessions that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British workers made to the rise of time-discipline, as Thompson describes them. He chronicles the direct resistance laborers initially put up to the onslaught that people's working habits suffered. But in a second stage, “as the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight, not against time, but about it.”Footnote ⁴¹ In the same way, Pernambuco's sugarcane workers fought to regulate tasks, rather than to discard them.Footnote ⁴² We lack records telling us what the Roçadinho 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 constraints of shifting tenantry rules.

Bezerra appreciated the Table for its protection of workers against arbitrary treatment in the fields, but the Table also had other implications. Clearly the Table represented a new stage in the conflict over labor time and measurement, 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 an eight-hour day, the Table's sensitivity to variations in terrain and conditions stands out. The Table also, then, meant a new perspective toward the environment of labor. In land clearing (roçagem), for instance, it separated thick, medium, and sparse brush, with requirements running from one-half to one and a half counts for the different categories. We can analyze this new perspective in at least two ways. First, the Table changed understandings and lived realities of space and power. Plantations had been realms of nearly unquestioned planter authority, but the Table, a mediating instrument between workers and bosses, represented the introduction of a competing power into this space.Footnote ⁴³ Second, the Table established a new perspective toward the cane fields, one that was much more sensitive to agro-environmental nuance than the traditional planter view that was guided by the simple imperative to corral and control labor.

A very simple example of the Table perspective lies in the category of cane harvesting, 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 generally. In the stipulations for cane cutting, the Table included the categories good, medium, and sparse cane, and followed with the note that “good cane to cut is understood as thin canes on clear land.”Footnote ⁴⁴ A worker interviewed in 2003 had to think for a minute before describing “good cane,” a phrase he had used repeatedly; it seemed an intuitively obvious category to him. He eventually said good cane meant “thick and growing close together, and good and strong … it's good in a flat area or a recently planted area.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This contrast between the Table's definition and the worker's shows that the very idea of “good cane to cut” is inherently subjective, and cane fields themselves are infinitely variable. The orderly grid of the Table cannot precisely capture this double variation. In a sense, any process in the human and natural worlds contains vast variability, no matter how straightforward it appears. But the Table tried to capture and account for the variability of both worker preference and environmental conditions, and it is important to register this perspective and recognize its divergence from the prior norms. This shift also produced changes in behavior.

While the definition of good cane was subjective and variable, it was neither arbitrary nor unimportant. In the years following the ETR's passage, planters sought various ways to cut labor costs. One was to hire workers without signing work cards, thereby avoiding state oversight and dispensing with the benefits those workers should have received. During these early years after the ETR, planters may have anticipated support from the state for this tactic because the military seized power in 1964, a development discussed further below. Planters would punish formally contracted workers by offering more desirable tasks to the informal workers. A complaint that a union president sent to the regional labor inspector in 1966 details this approach on the lands 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 fields full of weeds. The mill's field administrator justified the practice, the union official wrote, complaining that labor productivity had fallen since the Table's adoption.Footnote ⁴⁶ Workers cleaved tightly to the Table, internalizing its rules and prescriptions. The workers Santos and Da Silva both made frequent mention in their interviews of the various measurements for tasks, rattling them off by memory: x amount of land to weed with hard ground, y amount when certain tenacious weeds were involved, and on and on.Footnote ⁴⁷

In its aspirations to synthesize and represent, the Table looks like the sort of “simplifying instruments” of state power that James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State, his study of high modernist ideologies and the schemes for control devised by twentieth century authoritarian states. He argues that states seek to improve the “legibility” of societies by devising mechanisms—such as censuses and cadastral surveys—for clarifying technocrats' vision of the natural and social order. Scott begins his book with a brief history of modern scientific forestry's emergence in Germany, an example that does not involve state interaction with society. But he wants to describe the state's attempt to order and control the environment through rationally outlined, grid-based forest plots, intending to demonstrate the connection between this urge for environmental control and high modernist states' approach to their societies. For people, states used censuses and registries instead of plat maps of forest, but the basic techniques were the same. Schemes to control the environment reappear in Scott's arguments throughout the book. In both the “natural” and the human cases, Scott argues, the instruments that states develop to monitor and oversee actually change the reality they describe. Mixed German hardwood forests became orderly rows of single species; social subjects are gradually molded into a shape congenial to state vision.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Table generated a new reality, an abstraction from the environmental diversity and work process of the actual labor that took place in the fields. Though the shape of the Task Table fits the model Scott describes, it did not originate as a state tool for oversight and measurement but was born at a moment of worker power, through a process of negotiation with planters.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was intended not to control workers so much as planters, or to restrain the amount of work demanded.Footnote ⁵⁰ The workers took the measure of labor in the sense of controlling the means or methods of measurement, pushing against planters' attempts to measure labor as a means of increasing demands. We see a parallel to this approach in the system workers established in the British West Indian cane industry of the 1940s, where they mastered “a complicated system of task definitions.” An economist at the time claimed that the rules “stagger[ed] the understanding of outsiders,” but workers used the system to maximize their earnings, and their unions fought assiduously to protect it.Footnote ⁵¹ Pernambuco's unions did not achieve quite so favorable a system, but they were still able to exert a measure of control over their workplace through the Table.Footnote ⁵² The workers were not alone in seeing the attraction of a regulating instrument; the military state found the Table useful as well as it extended its involvement in the sugar industry.Footnote 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's rural labor movement. The state's sugar mills shuddered to a halt as 200,000 rural workers walked off the job. The strike ended with a collective agreement that granted workers an 85 percent wage increase; the unions also demanded the Task Table's inclusion in the agreement, emphasizing that all planters must obey its provisions.Footnote ⁵⁴ The dramatic strike came in the context of acute political conflict at the national level. President João Goulart vowed that he would enact sweeping structural reforms, including a land reform that promised to upend traditionally concentrated landholding patterns. The Brazilian military objected to Goulart's plans and the threat they represented to political order. The Northeast also weighed on their minds. They saw in Peasant League agitation and the rapid unionization of sugarcane workers, followed by their strike, the potential for radical revolution.Footnote ⁵⁵ Tensions heightened in the early months of 1964, and in April the military toppled Goulart and seized power.

With the military's ascent and the arrests of leaders like Francisco Julião and Gregório Bezerra, sugarcane planters saw an opportunity to undo the Accord and insisted that the Table be reformulated. They claimed that the Table was unfair to them and that they had been “forced to respect it by the Communists.” In response, the dictatorship made its first major incursion into the nitty-gritty of labor in the cane zone. Their method indicated they would take a hands-on, interventionist approach to the region and its dominant industry. New military-appointed representatives from the Ministry of Labor, the state government, the army, and “qualified technicians” were assigned to research work norms in the region and to formulate a new Table.Footnote ⁵⁶ This thorough and heavily bureaucratized approach set the tone for the military state's style in addressing labor issues and agricultural planning alike.

The dictatorship structured its systematic supervision of the industry with the creation in 1965 of the Interministerial Working Group for the Sugar Industry (GTIA), which brought together the Northeastern Development Agency (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 civilian governments of the 1950s and early 1960s had themselves embarked on an intensive planning adventure. For example, SUDENE, established in 1959, represented an enormous experiment in the efficacy of planning; but the military embraced structural planning with even greater fervor. They would go on to develop much farther reaching plans, including the Sugar Agroindustry Rationalization Program and the National Program for Sugar Cane Improvement in 1971, the Support Program for the Sugar Agroindustry in 1973, and the National Alcohol Program in 1975.Footnote ⁵⁷ Each of these programs received enormous budgets and required field offices and staffs in multiple sugar-producing states. The dictatorship's bureaucratization of the sugar sector extended in multiple directions, and its treatment of the Task Table was one small example of this approach.Footnote ⁵⁸

The team convened to write the new Table did not meet the sugar producers' expectations. Rather than scrapping the document as the planters had hoped, the military's commission added even more detailed prescriptions. When the original Task Table was established, it brought workers an element of control over their work, but it was also explicitly backed by the power of the state, given that Arraes had midwifed its birth. This fact, combined with the shape it took made the Table a congenial fit with the military regime's technocratic approach. The military commission embraced the previous version's framework and added new levels of nuance and complexity. For example, the previous Table had left weeding norms up to the “understanding” of the worker and foreman, but the “Table of the Revolution” (as the 1964 Table came to be called) outlined six types of terrain for weeding, each with specifically calibrated task sizes.Footnote ⁵⁹

The fact that the dictatorship retained the Task Table at all, and even lent it the legitimacy of a recalibration, indicates the space left open after the coup for workers' activities. The unions remained as well, and though participation sagged when the military arrested prominent organizers following the coup, they had regained their earlier membership levels by 1967–1968.Footnote ⁶⁰ Given the close state oversight of unions, the coup seriously threatened their continued advocacy for workers. But there were even a few strikes after the coup; in Cabo the rural workers struck several times between 1965 and 1968 to demand respect for the Table and payment of back wages.Footnote ⁶¹ Workers contended with widespread planter disregard for the Table, but having at least one legal weapon for their daily struggles in the fields was better than having nothing at all. Francisco Julião captured this view of labor law when he acknowledged that labor law “does not and never has functioned fully” but emphasized that rural wage earners must conduct their movement within the laws' boundaries since they hold “a promise of liberation.”Footnote ⁶² Crucially, this promise existed within the boundaries of state institutions. The Table, the rural labor courts, and Labor Ministry oversight of the unions had all existed for less than a year when the military came to power. Under the new regime, these instruments and institutions came to exert effects on those implicated in their application.Footnote ⁶³ In the case of workers, the transforming effects of these institutions included a heightened sensibility of common burdens and shared mechanisms for resistance.

Workers favored the Table revised through the new regime's elaborate process, the “Table of the Revolution.” Tasks were set close to the levels they had set in the original 1963 Table, and the document spelled out protective provisions such has having union delegates on every plantation and requiring that employers sign work cards. However, shortly after the new Table's implementation, planters demanded yet another reformulation. Mired in a crisis caused by loss of market share and low industrial yields, the planters claimed that workers could finish tasks in half a day and their labor costs were far higher than their competitors in the south.Footnote ⁶⁴ Soon, the GTIA recommended that tasks be changed in the interest of “stimulating an increase in productivity.” The group suggested the use of incentives—prizes and raises for productive workers—as well as penalties for underproduction. By November of 1965, a committee had been formed to look into various questions having to do with the cane industry, and the planters succeeded in forcing the adoption of a new Task Table that outlined larger task limits.Footnote ⁶⁵

From the Cabo union's daring strikes to the rewriting of task limits, across a decade and a half of planter intransigence workers struggled to enforce the Table. They faced excessive task sizes, the assignment of desirable work to informal workers lacking work cards (as a disincentive to workers' seeking legal contracts), ineffective regional labor commissioners unwilling to punish planters, and other challenges.Footnote ⁶⁶ The rural union federation president complained in 1966 that planters were “transforming the system of task work into a means of escaping the obligation of paying the minimum wage.” Bosses measured tasks too large for a worker to complete “if he is not helped by some member of his family.” The union president accused rural producers of lacking the business sense to invest in their workers and instead practicing management techniques “condemned over 30 years ago.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This last comment emphasizes the workers' conception of the Table's role in a historic battle for better conditions and treatment and perhaps fit into a rhetorical strategy of situating themselves as representing progress and modernity while the planters stood for backwardness and resistance to change.

Two years later, the federation president remained exasperated and he circulated a document titled “Why the Workers Do Not Believe in Tables.” The pages recounted the history of the agreements from the establishment of the first one in 1963 to the state of disrespect he saw in the present day. The broadside answered planter complaints about some workers finishing tasks in less than eight hours, which they always used as an argument for expanding task sizes. The federation said that planters failed to understand the exertion required from workers seeking to complete their tasks in less time and listed the reasons they expended such effort: to plant their own subsistence crops, to make time for earning extra money, to help or spend time with their families.Footnote 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).Footnote ⁶⁹ The government directed planters to attend to the Table, but complaints the next year revealed continued negligence among producers.Footnote ⁷⁰ One union sent a letter in 1969 to the Federal Police (no doubt with little effect) complaining that a plantation owner named Antonio 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 affirmed by the Regional Labor Inspector.Footnote ⁷¹ When workers asked for the benefits due them, planters habitually responded that they should go “hunt for their rights” in the courts.Footnote ⁷² In some cases, this actually proved fruitful.

The Task Table in Labor Court

The ETR included plenty of regulations with which planters were disinclined to comply, from paid holidays through the “thirteenth wage,” paid at the end of the year. From the moment of the ETR's passage, and at an accelerated rate after the coup, employers severed official employment relationships with increasing numbers of workers. Union officials complaining about the mills hiring workers and refusing to sign work cards was the tip of the iceberg. The Regional Labor Tribunal Archive's holdings for one local labor court in the heart of the most productive part of the sugarcane region contain 3,600 contract rescissions for the year 1965 alone. That number of workers must have amounted to a large percentage of the total workers in sugarcane for the district. Most files contain a worker's thumbprint signaling their acknowledgement of the contract termination. Many are blank, meaning the worker did not appear at the court to accept or contest the rescission.Footnote ⁷³

Most of these fired workers continued to work for the plantations, but they lacked work cards and had to strike short-term agreements with planters or work with contractors—middlemen between the workers and the planters. Contractors hired workers on a daily basis and sold a work group's labor to planters.Footnote ⁷⁴ By hiring these independent gangs of workers, planters could dispense not only with their responsibilities toward resident workers, but also with most of their overseers. Contractors took a cut of an established payment from the planter or mill and distributed the rest among their workers, short-circuiting the state-mandated benefits system. This contracted work gang system emerged at least as early as the 1930s, but it increased in ubiquity as the state's role in labor relations grew and by the 1970s had become routine. A 1972 document produced by FETAPE argues that temporary labor exceeded permanent labor by a wide margin.Footnote ⁷⁵

Just as contract work grew in Brazil, the entire world experienced a sharp rise in nontraditional or “informal” labor relations in the 1970s, referred to as the flexibilization of the labor force.Footnote ⁷⁶ The larger strategy was pursued through other tactics, depending on the context or industry. In São Paulo's auto industry during the 1970s, for example, unions accused large firms of systematically firing and hiring workers as a means of suppressing wages. The practice probably also helped discourage the emergence of organizing momentum among workers.Footnote ⁷⁷ The term used to describe undocumented workers among Pernambuco'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 therefore “hidden” from labor law. The term also implies some form of illegality or extra-legality; this connotation was particularly resonant during a time when the dictatorship's repression had forced some people into living clandestinely.

In the mid-1970s, the issue of clandestine labor came up repeatedly in the courts, and examining these cases provides another window into the relevance and 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 Boa Vista plantation, in a municipality called Nazaré da Mata, when the father and husband José was admitted as a tenant.Footnote ⁷⁸ Five years later, José took the planter to the Nazaré da Mata labor court for failure to provide benefits, and he won a judgment that paid him back wages. The next year, in March of 1977, José's wife Severina and their four daughters filed a complaint against the Boa Vista plantation with the court. Severina testified that the planter had retaliated against his “ungrateful” employee by preventing her and their daughters from working. The women claimed they had been fired, and the planter therefore owed them back benefits as well as the indemnification due to employees fired without warning. Boa Vista's lawyer called the case “a scheme without precedent,” explaining that Severina and her daughters helped José in his work and increased his production, but that this did not constitute a labor relationship between the women and the plantation. The women did not have work cards signed by the plantation, and they had never received any wages directly from the foreman or planter, a fact they admitted.Footnote ⁷⁹

The Conceição women occupied increasingly common roles for the cane region. By 1968, at least 15 percent of field workers lacked signed work cards, and that proportion grew as the numbers of dismissals cited above indicate.Footnote ⁸⁰ But this case also highlights the specific situation of women. Joaquim dos Santos had grown up in the municipality where the Conceiçãos lived, and he said his mother had not worked the cane fields. “In this area of the northern cane zone women didn't work,” he said. “They did family work, taking care of children and the garden.”Footnote ⁸¹ From a formal standpoint, things had not changed much between Joaquim's childhood and the 1960s. A union federation report from 1968 found that only 8 percent of women in the northern sugar zone earned their own documented wages. The southern part of the sugar region had a longer tradition of women working, and there, according to the report, a quarter of women had signed cards. But a large proportion of women worked alongside fathers or husbands, without their own direct compensation.Footnote ⁸² This shared work was common, as the union federation president writing the 1966 report had implied when he complained that workers required family members to complete tasks.Footnote ⁸³ What the arrangement meant for Severina and her daughters was that they were “clandestines,” doubly hidden from the state; 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 the Conceição women's lack of a labor relationship and calling witnesses to corroborate the fact. But he continued, as he put it, “just for the sake of argument.” If the women had had signed work cards, he pointed out, the plantation must not have fired them because they continued to live on the property. In making this observation, the lawyer mixed the logic of patronage and tenantry with the logic of labor law. Residence on a plantation traditionally had been synonymous with a labor relationship (however informal) with the boss. The plantation owner must not have fired 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 legal employees so they must be prohibited from working in the fields. The mixed logic of the inherited system of labor and the emergent one caught Severina and her daughters in a trap. Habitation had once signaled employment, but, according to the ETR, employment must be accompanied by a contract. The women lived on the plantation and therefore had not been dismissed, but they also lacked contracts and therefore could not work. The local judges agreed and denied the women's complaint a month after they had filed it.

On the advice of the union lawyer, the women filed an appeal and won a hearing at the Regional Labor Tribunal (TRT). (Workers who suffered similar treatment but lacked access to a union lawyer likely stood little chance of pursuing the case without that support.) The case reopened in May, with the judges focusing on the details of José's work habits. In his testimony at the local court, the Boa Vista boss had referred to José's daily tasks in the plural, though all of the plantation's witnesses had claimed that José completed just one task per day. The witnesses also acknowledged that José's wife and daughters regularly worked with him. The TRT judges decided that the question of the women's labor relationship to Boa Vista revolved around how much work was routinely credited to José, the legal recipient of wages. If his pay stub showed more than one task for every day but he alone received wages, the judges argued, that would indicate that the employer was committing fraud because tasks were measured as a full day's work. Essentially, the judges' approach came down to a highly literal application of the Task Table. Even though everyone involved knew how much variability existed in practice, the Table 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 imply multiple laborers and therefore multiple employees.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Table's simplification of cane agriculture to a grid of assignments could not account for all conditions and situations. However, the TRT judges in this case nevertheless used it as a tool for cutting through the exploitative informalities of labor in the sugar zone (and perhaps battling the routine exploitation of assigned tasks too large to be completed in a day). Through careful parsing of contradictory witness testimony, the judges decided that José regularly completed more than one task per day. They relied primarily on the boss's own inadvertent admission of this fact in their final decision, released in July 1977. José's production, the judges said, was clearly made possible by the help of others—in this case, family members. They then set out to determine the regularity of his auxiliaries' service. On the basis of the witnesses' observations, they ruled that three of his daughters had provided labor to the plantation on a consistent enough basis to warrant their classification as employees. Therefore, the planter's refusal to offer them any more work must be understood as dismissal without warning, and they ordered the payment of restitution.Footnote ⁸⁵

In his statement at the TRT hearing, the Boa Vista lawyer did not dispute that Severina and her daughters had worked with José. He described the habitual use of family labor to augment men's production as simply a “peculiarity of work in the cane zone.”Footnote ⁸⁶ But precisely these sorts of “peculiarities,” in addition to the personalized relations that the lawyer had referenced in his statement to the local court, clashed with a regime of labor regulation based on official work cards, state-regulated benefits, and a social services system built on clear records of work rendered. The state could not “see” work performed by women in support of male family members and remunerated through payment to the men. The TRT's July judgment took one small step toward expanding the state'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 measuring quantities of labor rendered and making judgments on that basis about employee-employer relationships.

Many workers never took complaints to the labor courts, and many of those who did make it to court did not receive judgments as favorable as Severina's daughters'. But over the course of the 1970s women increasingly worked for their own wages, even if they rarely had signed work cards. As noted above, the union federation found regional differentiation in official employment for women in the 1960s. A comparison of labor court cases from two sample municipalities in the northern and southern parts of the region from 1977 shows a similar divergence, with women accounting for 13 percent of the northern cases but nearly half in the south.Footnote ⁸⁷ This pattern reflects a different pace of agricultural development, but in both areas women's documented labor was on the rise. Interviews I did in 2003 confirmed rising women's involvement with the unions in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁸ This increasing formalization worked in tandem with the same conditions that made the Task Table's emergence and continued relevance possible.