This Day in Labor History: May 15, 1984

On May 15, 1984, about 5,000 sugar workers around the town of Guariba, Brazil went on strike. This little known moment of worker resistance happened because of the terrible working conditions in an industry taking on increased global importance and capital investment by the 80s. It went far to transform Brazil as the dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1964 was losing control.

Brazil had a long history of sugar from the colonial period to the present. By the late 20th century, much more of that sugar was being grown for transformation into ethanol fuel than for traditional sugar production, where sugar beets and corn had increasingly become the dominant plants for global sweeteners. But by the late 19th century, much of the Brazilian fields had moved toward coffee production. In the 1950s, that began to shift back to sugar. At the same time, rural workers made increasing demands on the state for labor rights, with the Brazilian Communist Party leading many of these fights and gaining a lot of support in the sugar and coffee areas, especially in the northeast.

But the Brazilian state was a lot more in tune with the agricultural capitalists than the workers. It passed legislation allowing agricultural workers to be shifted over to temporary status to fit with the larger global agro-industrial model. Labor rights for rural workers declined and this was exacerbated by the rise of the dictatorship in 1964, which very much did not trust workers of any kind and had a lot of motivations of contempt for those impoverished people it considered susceptible to the evils of Marxism. Government sponsored coffee eradication programs after 1964 forced many workers into towns, where they could be exploited by the temporary agricultural model of the sugar that replaced it.

That was the story of the fields around Guariba, which is in the outer regions of Sao Paulo state. So to get to the job if you worked for Proálcool, you had to wake up very early and get to the transportation center at 4 am. You were packed like sardines into poorly maintained vehicles. They were designed for 45 people, but usually packed in 60. Then you had a 2 hour ride to the fields. There, you cut cane with your machete all day. Your food was just whatever sandwich you could afford to make. You worked until 4:30 pm. Then it was 2 hours back to town in the same overcrowded and dangerous trucks. This was the life of over 100,000 people in this area, of which 90% of them were temporary workers, so they couldn’t even guarantee themselves the bad lives that this might get them. Since so many of these workers had migrated from the northeast as their own sugar fields were eradicated or as the economic restructuring of the era closed heavy industry and forced workers back into agriculture, they also faced racism and classism from the snobby whites of Sao Paulo.

The work was hard and dangerous. In fact, you could mechanize quite a bit of this, but at least in the 80s, it was still cheaper to pay labor than design machines. The cane cut up the workers arms and the burning of the cane waste caused super polluted air that workers then breathed. Said one worker, “We spend the entire time swallowing that cane ash. We feel a bad fatigue and always have the flu.”

Proálcool was the company running the sugar production in Guariba. The proximate cause of the strike was an increase in the hours of the workday. Ethanol production was booming and there was a great demand. So Proálcool decided to make the workers labor for even longer, 2-3 hours a day.

When the workers decided to strike, it was both militant and quite connected to the basics of food acquisition. Workers blockaded the roads where employers trucked workers from town at dawn to work all day. They raided supermarkets for food. They were furious at the incredibly long work days that could be extended against their will, the very low wages, and the bad transportation from their homes to the fields. They also hated the food they ate. In fact, these workers were often known as bóias-frias, which means “cold sandwiches,” a reference to what they were forced to eat in the fields instead of a quality meal. The workers were serious too–they destroyed a couple of floors of the São Paulo State Basic Sanitation building.

The employers were not used to taking worker anger seriously. But the strike was strong and threatened the entire nation’s ethanol production regime. Proálcool liked to talk about its role in “job creation” and how it was improving the lives of poor Brazilians. Of course this was all a lie to make middle class people feel good about their nation, as it is today. The strike exposed the lies.

What made the strike work was the Catholic Church. Several local priests organized the workers around their common problems, which were hardly radical. By this time, much of the Brazilian church had also turned against the dictatorship, so there was more space for economic organizing, despite the right-wing Pope John Paul II in the Vatican and his henchman the future Pope Benedict XVI cracking down on liberation theology. The priests themselves were the organizers in this case and did the work to bring the permanent and temporary laborers together in common cause.

By the second day of the strike, workers were burning cane and threatened to burn more. They had the advantage that agricultural strikers often have, which is that cane went bad when not processed within 48 hours. It would be a total loss for the company if it did not acquiesce to workers’ demands. The strike quickly spread as well and within two days, probably half the sugar workers in the region had put down their cane knives.

In the end, Proálcool had to come to a collective bargaining agreement with the workers, the first in the industry in Brazil. It simply had too much money to lose. It immediately took back the expanded days it had forced on the workers. On May 17, it sat down with worker leaders, political figures, and other unions to negotiate an agreement. Workers actually won a lot. Not only did the expanded hours go away, but the transportation to and from work was now free. Cane prices rose to pay workers more. Employers now provided gloves and other protective gear to protect workers’ hands and arms. Paid holidays, as well as payment for days when the weather was too bad to work, was implemented for the first time. The only demand the workers had to give up was year-long contracts that would have ensured pay between harvests.

Not winning that last demand, plus the fact that despite all this they were still quite poor, meant that their lives didn’t change that much. But it still showed worker power and chipped away at the dictatorship that would fade away the next year. Said one worker leader, “Just the fact of us sitting at a table to discuss with employers already is a great victory, an unprecedented milestone in rural labor history. With this many families will be able to survive.” Life for the Brazilian rural working class is still deeply troubled, but the gains made because of actions in the 1980s continue to resonate today.

I borrowed from Jennifer Eaglin’s Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol to write this post.

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