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Racism
and labour in Brazil: From Colonial Roots to Neoliberal Capitalism
Racismo e
trabalho no Brasil: das raízes coloniais ao capitalismo neoliberal
Maria Zelma de Araújo MADEIRA
Universidade
Estadual do Ceará, Curso de Serviço Social, Fortaleza, CE, Brasil.
E-mail: zelmadeira@yahoo.com.br
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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2291-4455
Daiane Daine de Oliveira GOMES*
Universidade
Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, RN, Brasil.
E-mail: daianedaine@hotmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6294-2816
Abstract: The labour market is one of the spheres that unequivocally
expresses the persistent structure of racial inequality in Brazilian social
dynamics. This study briefly analyses aspects that contribute to understanding
the complexity of racism in social relations under Brazilian dependent
capitalism. Bibliographic research was conducted, grounded on the principles of
historical materialism, highlighting how colonialism, slavery, and abolitionism
without guaranteed rights are fundamental elements for understanding the
configuration of current labour relations. It concludes that racism remains one
of the main mechanisms responsible for the exclusion, or precarious inclusion,
of Black individuals from the labour market, and that the advance of
neoliberalism has maximised the processes of racial domination and the racialisation
of poverty.
Keywords: Racism. Labour. Capitalism.
Submitted
on: 14/6/2024. Accepted on: 30/6/2024.
1.
Introduction
|
T |
he complex dynamics
of the transition from modern slavery to dependent capitalism in Brazil and its
interpellation with the formation and development of the Brazilian labour
market require a critical analysis based on a theoretical effort. This requires
revisiting Marxist observations on the form that labour assumes in capitalist
society, as well as the racial issue in relationship to the totality of social
relations, highlighting its dynamic and complex connections with the production
and reproduction of social life in a society centred on the production of
value.
This
analysis presents some, far from exhaustive, considerations, in the hope of
contributing to the theoretical debate around the current conditions imposed by
contemporary capitalism on the Brazilian working class, highlighting the
relationship between racism and the understanding of structural issues. A
theoretical-methodological approach is employed, based on the principles of
historical materialism in dialogue with Black feminist debates. The study,
based on bibliographical research, seeks to foster a critical understanding of
the constitutive elements of capitalist sociability, which are based on racism
and sexism, and which operate to sustain it from its mercantile accumulation to
the present day.
The
discussion is structured into three topics: the first revisits some assumptions
about work, the form it assumes in capitalism, and its relationship with
racism, based on elements of Marxist analysis present mainly in Book I of Capital.
The second discusses the formation of the working class, focusing on the
experience of the Black population during the transition from slavery to free
labour in Brazil. Here, the writings of Clóvis Moura and Florestan Fernandes
are the main reference. Finally, the debate promoted by Lélia Gonzalez briefly
addresses the Brazilian labour market and its relationship with gender and
racial issues, and the current neoliberal context of deregulation, connecting
it to racial factors that structure class relations.
2.
Some assumptions
regarding the debate on racism, work, and exploitation in Brazil
This
analysis is based on the contributions of Marx in Capital, especially
those in Book I[1],
where Marx presents an analysis of the causes of the forms of work in
capitalist society that relate to the subordination, disqualification, and
devaluation of the workforce in the face of capital appreciation. It is also
based on other Marxist and Black feminist contributions that focus on the
analysis of social relations from the perspective of the link between class
exploitation and oppressions of sex/gender and race/ethnicity.
Although
the space available does not allow for a more in-depth development, some
assumptions are relevant to guide the considerations set out here. Firstly,
that: work founds the social being, and it is through this teleological,
conscious activity that the human being produces his own existence. Work is,
therefore, a form exclusive to human beings, since it differs from the
relationship between animals and nature not only because workers carry out
actions that transform natural matter, but because through this they achieve
their objective.
The
work process is thus composed of activities oriented towards an end, with its
objects and its means. “In the work process, therefore, man’s activity effects,
through the means of work, a transformation of the object of work, intended
from the beginning” (Marx, 1996, p. 300). The process ends in the product and,
when the human being transforms nature, the latter transforms himself.
The
second assumption refers to the complex relationship between capital and
labour: the production process in capitalism is also a process of value
formation, and capital is created and fed by labour power to achieve its
appreciation. In capitalism, the capitalist buys all the elements necessary for
the labour process, including labour power, and makes the worker consume the
means of production through his or her labour. Marx (1996) highlights two
peculiar phenomena of this process: 1) the worker works under the control of
the capitalist to whom his or her labour belongs; 2) although the direct
producer is the worker, the product is the property of the capitalist and not
the worker. Thus, “[...] the labour process is a process between things that
the capitalist has bought, between things that belong to him” (Marx, 1996, p.
304).
The
product of labour in capitalism is produced with the capitalist aiming to
obtain not only use value but also exchange value. He decides to produce use
values, only as long as they take the form of a product intended for sale: a
commodity. The capitalist “[...] wants to produce not only a use value but also
a commodity, not only use value but value, and not only value but also surplus
value” (Marx, 1996, p. 305). So, we can consider the production process in
capitalism also as a process of value formation[2].
For
capital to exist, therefore, labour, or the capital/labour relationship, must
exist, as capital is created and fed by labour power to achieve its
appreciation.
Thirdly, we understand that giving
theoretical and political attention to the racial issue does not mean breaking
with the social totality. Critical social theory has demonstrated that society
as a single unit does not have an intention, a shared teleology, but that
society possesses different and innumerable subjects who have a teleological
action, oriented towards a purpose. Men and women, whether individually or
collectively, based on their needs and interests, act according to an ideal of
purpose that they intend to achieve (Netto, 2009).
In this sense, singularity is
historically and socially constructed in the universality that materialises
through social activities conducted by humanity. This singular construction (of
each singular individual) – dependent on specific mediations that enable the
appropriation and objectification of becoming human, which is then synthesised
and condensed in the universality of gender, making each singular being rich in
universal humanisation – is what generates and forms human diversity (Santos,
2017). Considering that all individuals are social, historical, and diverse, it
is tacit that diversity must be understood in the singular/generic human
relationship. It encompasses, therefore, the expressions of ethnic/racial and
sex/gender relations, and without understanding these relations there can be no
understanding of the totality of social relations with all their complexity and
contradictions.
This leads us to the fourth assumption,
that racism is a structural phenomenon of social, economic, political, and
legal relationships, and is therefore endowed with historicity and materiality
(Almeida, 2019). Capitalism needs racism for its development. It is, therefore,
an active ideological mechanism of social relations that also affects the
organisation of the social division of labour and the complete set of social
life.
The capitalist system is fundamentally
linked to the ideological structures of patriarchy and racism because it needs
them. Oppression and exploitation form a dialectic unity, so that oppression
serves as a driving force for the achievement of exploitation (Barroso, 2018).
“[…] through oppression and domination, relationships, behaviours, and
mentalities are naturalised, which become privileges and inequalities, which
favour exploitation” (Barroso, 2018, p. 458).
Oppression and exploitation are,
therefore, related, and for this close and destructive relationship to be
revealed requires a perspective of the totality, which allows the understanding
of reality with its contradictions and historicity. An intersectional understanding
is also required to expose the link between the axes of power and
discrimination that produce structural oppressions, and in particular the axes
of racism, patriarchy, and the class structure (Crenshaw, 2002).
The
final assumption is that Brazil presents characteristics within its
socio-historical formation that have logically affected the constitution of the
social and racial division of labour. In particular, the condition – deeply
analysed by scholars such as Florestan Fernandes, Rui Mauro Marini, Lélia
Gonzalez, and Clóvis Moura, among others – of being a country founded on a
model of colonial exploitation maintained by a system of enslaved indigenous
people and Black men and women, which provided the basis for the formation of a
nation of peripheral capitalism of late development.
As in the rest of Latin America the transition between
colonial slavery and the emergence of capitalist relations of production took
on specific aspects in Brazil regarding the materiality of the general law of
capitalist accumulation. Consequent marks of the colonisation process can be
observed, based on the tripod of export monoculture, large estates, and an
enslaved Indigenous and Black labour force (Moura, 2019).
Such aspects were decisive in the formation of a model
of late developing subordinate capitalism, coupled with an extremely insecure labour
market, as it failed to absorb, or even actively excluded, Black and Indigenous
men and women people from production processes (Moura, 2019).
The
following section addresses the formation of the Brazilian working class and makes
a theoretical effort to grasp the complexity of its concrete dynamics
intertwined with racial relations.
3.
The formation of the
Brazilian working class and the racial issue
The
theoretical thoughts of Clóvis Moura, which began in the 1940s, are still
relevant when considering the formation of the country in relation to the
dimensions of class, racial relations, and the Black experience of work. Moura
(2014b), explains how modern slavery initially emerged as an constitutive
element of capitalism at the historical moment in which those holding economic
power applied their surpluses in commercial enterprises “[...] that expanded
through the control of an area – Africa – in which it sought merchandise to
sell; and through the exploitation of other areas – Brazil, the Antilles, [and]
other South America countries – that consumed the merchandise they took: the
slave” (Moura, 2014b, p. 36).
During
commercial capitalism, the phase that enabled the primitive accumulation of
capital in Europe, colonial Brazil was a commercial enterprise for the
extraction of natural resources operated through slavery. Within this mode of
production, which lasted for almost four centuries, the enslaved person was
“[...] the merchandise that produced merchandise, the thing that moved [...]”
(Moura, 2014a, p. 44), devoid of any trace of humanity, being seen as something
without integrity, without intelligence, and destined only for manual labour.
Slave
labour became a fundamental component of the social history of labour in
Brazil. It established a production relationship that, to boost productivity
and condition the lives of these slaves to captivity, was extremely alienating
and violent.
The
visibility given by Moura[3] to
the various elements of the struggle of enslaved people against captivity also
highlights the internal dynamics of Brazilian society during the colonial
period, and demonstrates that the formation of the country took place through
the fundamental contradiction of masters versus the enslaved.
During
that period, enslaved people were the protagonists; slavery not only generated
profit, the state form or identities marked by African ancestry and culture,
but also served as a stage for political struggles through quilombos, escapes,
rebellions, religion, and multiple forms of resistance by enslaved people –
forms that gave impetus to the unfolding of history. Faced with these
struggles, the ruling class demanded a strong ideological slave apparatus to confront
them:
In view of this, the
image of Black people had to reject their human dimension. On the one hand,
there was a need for powerful repressive mechanisms so that they could [be
forced to] remain in those permitted social spaces, while, on the other, their
rebellious dynamics opposed this. Hence the need to regard them as irrational,
their rebellious attitudes as a social or even biological pathology (Moura,
2019, p. 46).
The
prohibition of the slave trade in the 1850s dealt a major blow to this economic
regime, based on forced labour. In addition to the Eusébio de Queiroz Law, the
Land Law was also enacted to regulate land ownership. This new regulation did
not, however, encourage small rural properties, since it returned property to
the sesmeiros. This left the thousands of workers who lived in these areas,
mainly on a subsistence basis, as illegal occupants. At that time, the
percentage of enslaved people, as a proportion of the population, was already
beginning to decline. At the beginning of the 19th century, they formed 50% of
the population; by 1872, this number had fallen to 16% (Theodoro, 2022). As the
complex process of transition from slave labour to free labour began, relations
were renewed, but they maintained many of the features of the previous regime.
In 1888, Brazil became the last country
in the world to abolish slavery. This event ended the slave regime, but did not
eliminate domination, exploitation, and violence based on racial determinants.
Production relationships based on racism emerged, and were maintained in the
post-abolition period, which operated as an “[...] ideological fuel capable of
justifying the economic-social, racial, and cultural sifting to which it is
[still] currently subjected in Brazil through a series of discriminatory
mechanisms that follow one another in the biography of each Black person”
(Moura, 2019, p.39).
The
historical labour conditions established during the colonial period are not
examined here with the aim of pointing out a linearity or anachronism in
today’s labour relations, but rather with the aim of establishing – based on an
understanding of the racialisation of Africans trafficked as merchandise – how
racism emerged in the world of work and became a structuring element of class
relations and a defining factor in a racial division of the Brazilian labour
market. The post-abolition period also has crucial elements that must be
analysed:
The formation of the
Brazilian working class is marked by contradictions. While in Europe the
transition to capitalism was marked by the introduction of wage labour, in
Brazil wage labour coexisted with slave labour for decades. From the beginning
of the 19th century, it was possible to observe the existence of artisan
workshops and factories in the state of Rio de Janeiro using free and slave
labour in the same workplace (Andrade, 2021, p. 160).
Florestan
Fernandes (1972) explains that, until the mid-19th century, the market economy
did not give rise to the typical modern organisation – in the capitalist sense
– of work and economic relations. Brazilian society faced great difficulties in
relation to the spreading and integration of the competitive social order.
Ambiguous relations prevailed, supported by authoritarian forms from the
slavery period, and which drastically deviated from the democratic principles
of distribution and access to opportunities.
Only
from the 1860s onwards, when the crisis of the slave system reached its climax,
did the urban sector become modernised and the replacement of slave labour by
wage labour in manufacturing gained momentum. Soon, the disintegration of the
slave/noble social order and the development of a competitive social order
emerged as concomitant social phenomena.
In this broad
context, the situation of Black and mixed-race people was affected from three
different directions. Until this period, as slaves and formerly enslaved people,
they had had a strong and untouchable position in the structure of the economy.
As soon as the entire structure of the production system began to change, this
position was threatened on two fronts. The international market provided the
country with immigrants from Europe, who came in search of the richest and most
developing areas, to work as a wage-earning class, in rural and urban areas, or
as peddlers, shopkeepers, merchants or manufacturers. Additionally, traditional
white families began to move from the countryside to the big cities, and the
poor or dependent people emerged as an increasingly large wage-earning sector.
[...] In the rapidly developing coffee farm regions, newcomers, foreign or
national, absorbed the best economic opportunities, even in rural areas,
accelerating the slavery crisis and transforming Black and mixed-race people into
a marginalised sector of the population and a sub-proletariat (Fernandes, 1972,
p. 65).
For
Fernandes, the Black population, which had been victimised by slavery, also
became a victim of the crisis of the slave system. The “[...] social revolution
of the competitive social order [...]” (Fernandes, 1972, p. 64) in no way
threatened white supremacy. It merely reorganised relations in a way that
created new terrible conditions of “[...] partial or total exclusion of the
former agent of slave labour and the freed from the vital flow of economic
growth and local development” (Fernandes, 1972, p. 66).
Black
men and women were forced to the periphery of the competitive social order, or
to semi-colonial and colonial structures inherited from the past, when they
played important roles in maintaining the rural economy. Even when they
remained in the big cities, they found themselves in even more deplorable
situations, conglomerating into slums and situations of temporary or permanent unemployment.
Florestan
(1972), following from this, points to prejudice and colour discrimination as
structural and dynamic causes of the organisation of social relations in
Brazilian capitalism, an ideological mechanism used to restrict educational, social,
and political opportunities, keeping Black men and women on the margins or even
outside the system.
It
is well understood that the process of the formation of the working class in
Brazil occurred before the industrialisation process and linked capitalist
forms with pre-capitalist forms of production. This provided the basis for
different hierarchies in the composition of the working class, with the demarcation
of distinct positions and opportunities between Black and White people. The majority of Black men and women were excluded from
formal jobs and in extreme poverty, relegated to the worst scenario under
capitalism: that of not finding buyers for their labour.
Until
the early 1930s, a racialist and eugenic paradigm prevailed. This attributed
the standard of civility to White European phenotypes, and the representation
of social degeneration to Black and Indigenous peoples. For groups
discriminated against on racial and ethnic grounds, this period meant exclusion
from formal jobs, which defined their inability to work for wages and sought to
erase their history and existence.
From
these racist ideas[4],
a national project was built that aimed at Whitening the population through
miscegenation, exclusion, and the elimination of non-whites. In
order to ensure its status as a developed nation, Brazil had to Whiten.
For example, the anthropologist Roquete Pinto, as
president of the 1st Brazilian Eugenics Congress, in 1929, “[...]
predicted years later, and despite his criticism of racist positions, an
increasingly White country: in 2012 we will have a population composed of 80% Whites
and 20% mixed-race people; no Blacks, no Indians” (Schwarcz, 2012, p. 26).
Once
the racialist and eugenic paradigms were overcome, a new framework of discourse
and thoughts regarding national identity emerged, now with a culturalist bias. Culture
would be the key element for interpreting our formation. Miscegenation and
hybridism were exalted in a distorted interpretation of slavery and racial
relations in Brazil. The assertion that prejudice did not exist gained
strength, in accordance with the myth of racial democracy: we had built a
mixed-race society free of major racial conflicts. This, incidentally, is a
peculiar and specific aspect of Brazil. “From this perspective, the dynamic
contributions of the Black population were cast into the shadows of history, or
at most were analysed from the point of view of categories such as
assimilation, accommodation, and acculturation” (Queiroz, 2021, p. 256).
In
the meantime, new mechanisms for reproducing racial inequalities were being
developed, enabling the normalisation of the marginalisation of the Black
population from the wage labour market and their limiting to subsistence and
informal jobs[5].
Faced with the myth that racism does not exist, the only person culpable for
their misery would be the Black individual himself or herself, due to a lack of
effort in a society where everyone is equal before the law.
Thinking
about the formation of the Brazilian working class therefore requires thinking
outside the standard of the White, industrial, urban male and the European
working class. To analyse contemporary times, it is necessary to encompass its
complexity and diversity. Reflecting in greater depth on the conditions of a
large portion of Black people outside this standard, who continue their struggle
within the social, racial, and international division of labour, contributes to
unmasking the elements that obscure the distinctions between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat today and that hinder the materialisation of alliances
within the working class.
4.
The present day: The
needs of capital, labour, and racism
The
1930s marked a period of economic and social change. Brazil witnessed an
increase in urbanisation, economic modernisation, and the creation of a better
regulated and protected labour market. Starting under the Getúlio Vargas government,
innovations were introduced, such as the regulation of vacations, working
hours, job stability, healthy working conditions, and the definition of a
minimum wage and a work card as mandatory for the registration of employment
contracts (Theodoro, 2022).
Given
these new developments, one might ask: what about the social segments not
integrated into the formal and registered labour order? The answer is that such
segments were the target of greater social marginalisation. They were not only non-workers;
the intermittent unemployed, and odd-job workers[6] were
labelled as unemployed, or as idlers, and marginalised. Although further progress
was made in 1943, with the enactment of the Consolidated Labour Laws (Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho,
CLT), these gains were not applied in a generalised manner. It is worth noting
that:
In the five decades
between 1930 and 1980, the modernisation process allowed the absorption into
the labour market of segments of the Black population that, until the 1930s,
had been almost completely marginalised. The revaluation of the national
workforce that followed the end of the period of mass immigration directly
benefited Black and mixed-race people. As Kowarick
states: ‘At that moment [...] the economic needs for labour transformed
everyone, Blacks, Whites and Mulattos, nationals or foreigners, into
commodities for capital’ (Theodoro, 2022, p. 129).
However,
as the sociologist Lélia Gonzalez (2020) rightly points out, “[...] the
so-called Brazilian miracle benefited only a minority of the domestic
population and, above all, multinationals [...]” (Gonzalez, 2020, unpaginated),
so this process did not mean a reversal of the situation to which the Black
Brazilian population had been subjected. According to Gonzalez, in the 1970
Census, 36% of total personal income was concentrated in the hands of 5% of the
richest families in Brazil, and almost 100% of the Black population lived in
informality – without job security – or was unemployed. Even when they had the
same or better educational level, they were overlooked in relation to Whites.
The
1964 military coup brought about economic and political changes through violent
repression of many sectors of the population. During this period, which saw
great economic expansion, foreign capital aggressively flowed into Brazil and
expanded its industrial base. This change led to the disappearance of many small
businesses, which directly affected Black workers, since it was principally through
these businesses that they participated in the industrial labour market.
Furthermore,
changes in the countryside, with the absorption of small rural properties to
expand large estates, had a major impact on Black rural workers. The consequent
high unemployment rates drove the migration of these groups to urban centres,
expanding the number of favelas. Construction, short-term contracting, domestic
service, and public transportation became the main occupational alternatives
for Black men and women because they did not require educational or
professional qualifications (Gonzalez, 2020).
The
1970s were marked by stagnation and the crisis of the Taylorist and Fordist pattern
of accumulation, and this brought about transformations in global capitalism
that had a profound impact on the world of work. Given the obstacles to the processes
of accumulation, measures were implemented that changed the organisation of the
international division of labour and the composition of the global working
class. International corporations quickly relocated, imposing absurd working conditions
that were increasingly degraded. This concentrated a greater proportion of
production in countries on the periphery of the system (Antunes, 2018).
As part of the same
process, in several countries in the global South, the number of workers,
mainly in the service sector, agribusiness and industry, has significantly
expanded. In essence, capital’s response to its crisis was based, and enhanced
by the internationalisation of the economy, on a particular form of the linking
of strategies to extract more absolute and relative value; these measures would
be accentuated from 2008 onwards, amid new manifestations of the structural
crisis of the system. In Brazil, particularly in the 1990s, the transformations
generated by the new international division of labour were very intense, since
they started from an internal dynamic characteristic of dependent
industrialised countries, based on the overexploitation of the workforce. The
imposition of low wages, associated with intensified production rates and long
working hours, was further accentuated by the disorganisation of the workers’
and union movements [...] (Antunes, 2018, p. 138).
This
is the context in which neoliberalism developed in Brazil in the 1990s, amid a
combination of old and new mechanisms typical of flexible accumulation forms and
the process of restructuring production. From then on, informalisation and insecurity
in the workplace increased, reducing workers’ rights, and subjecting them to
degrading living and working conditions.
It
is known that the Black population, due to the structures inherited from the
colonial period, was already living with this insecure work model even before
it was restructured as a new mode of capitalist accumulation. The advance of
neoliberalism, however, maximised the processes of racial domination and the
racialisation of poverty[7].
With the deregulation of work and lack of social protection, the working
conditions of the Black population have become increasingly generalised to
other workers. In this context, there are more disputes over jobs that White
people would once not have competed for because they were considered inferior
activities.
According
to Gonzalez (2020), Brazil, although it differs from other countries that
industrialised earlier due to its unequal and dependent capitalism and its late
development, has a sophisticated element of racism, which has become integrated
into capitalism as an important tool for the reproduction of and ideology
appropriate for the accumulation of capital.
Furthermore,
“[...] racism helps to blur the distinctions between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, reinforcing the differences that isolate and oppose potential
allies within the working class” (Araújo, 2020, unpaginated). In line with this
reasoning, racism, although it more directly and profoundly harms the Black
population, affects the entire working class. Gonzalez (2020) also conducted an
analysis on the position of the Black population within the labour market in
the 1970s and 1980s, focusing mainly on Black women and young people:
Given that more than
half of the Brazilian population is made up of people under 21 years of age,
and that the majority of the Brazilian population is,
in fact, Afro-Brazilian, we can see the severe problem facing the Black youth:
unemployment (open or not). There are currently around sixteen million
adolescents and young people in Brazil who are completely left to their own
devices, without the slightest prospect in life; or rather, their only
prospects are banditry and death (Gonzalez, 2020, unpaginated).
This reality, for adolescents and young
people, has not changed for the positive in the last decades of the 20th
century. According to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics (Instituto
Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) (2020), among all age groups, young Black people were in
the worst situation, with rates of informal employment in 2019 above 50%, and
an unemployment rate close to 25%.
In
the case of young Black women, Gonzalez explains that the main outlet is
domestic work for middle-class and bourgeois families, or open prostitution and
the mulatto profession. Under capitalism, Black women are not only exploited
economically, through work, but also through sexual exploitation and social
reproduction. The stereotypes of the housekeeper, wet nurse, and the body
that was subject to rape during slavery have been dragged on throughout
Brazilian history (Gonzalez, 2020). These stereotypes, perpetuated in the
social imagination by the media and literature, have a strong impact on their
relationships, not only in the job market[8], but
also in relation to affection and self-esteem.
Current
neoliberal policies have generated the perverse effect of making the work and
lives of the working class less secure, and their impacts are becoming more
acute and normalised. This has been supported by a restating of the racist
ideology that sustained the cruel system of slavery and the beginning of the
Republic. The Brazilian reality continues to expose the, mostly Black, working
class to exhausting workdays, poor health, and hygiene conditions, forced
labour, and lack of social protection, among other rights violations.
The
labour market is, in this sense, the channel through which the structure of the
racial inequalities in social dynamics are undeniably revealed. Black people,
in addition to being those who benefit to a lesser extent and more slowly from the
benefits of periods of economic growth – as can be seen in the example of the
period of the economic miracle – are also those who suffer the greatest losses
and deprivations in periods of economic stagnation or crisis. This was observed,
for example, during the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, a period in
which the Black population was the most affected.
Regarding
the pandemic, in 2020 Silva and Silva (2020) analysed the National Household
Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD
COVID-19)), developed by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto
Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)). They concluded that, because a
large portion of the Black population were active in the informal market, they
were either prevented from working during the period of social isolation or
were forced to continue working and thereby expose themselves to a greater risk
of infection simply to ensure the minimum for their survival. During this
period,
In June 2020, people who identified as Black or mixed-race
(Pardo) accounted for 54.9% of the workforce, comprising 52.5% of those
employed and 60.3% of those unemployed. During the first months of the pandemic
in the country, the unemployment rate increased for all colour or race groups,
with the overall average rising from 10.7% to 13.1% between May and July.
Considering only the Black population – men and women –, the increase was even
higher: it rose from 10.7% and 13.8% to 12.7% and 17.6%, respectively. (Silva;
Silva, 2020, p. 8)
It is clear that
multiple and intersecting
inequalities affect the concrete reality of the Black population in all spheres
of life. In this case, labour relations stand out, which manifest themselves
differently from those experienced by workers as a whole and which weaken
employment relationships and social protection. So, in order
to directly impact the significant level of racial inequality that
currently exists in the labour market and in the forms of organisation within
the working class, employment guarantee policies need to be developed and coordinated
with the expansion of social and labour protection networks while not losing
sight of the anti-racist, feminist and anti-imperialist perspective.
5.
Final considerations
In
conclusion, the Black experience of work in Brazil has been historically permeated
by racist mechanisms with the objective of reproducing their position of
subordination within the capitalist mode of production. Those that live by
working, that is the vast majority of this contingent of Black workers, has had
its living conditions impoverished as more advanced stages of capital are
reached in generating more value.
The
intersection between racism and class relations is, to this day, responsible
for the perpetuation of inequalities in the Brazilian labour market. In
practice, the almost total absence of Black men and women in socially relevant
jobs, such as political and economic leadership, has become normalised, while
the number of people in underemployment, informal work or unemployment has
increased. This situation is also accompanied by the perpetuation of
institutionally racist practices and by weak state mechanisms for protecting
workers, including in combating racial discrimination in the workplace.
So,
we have a long way to go to change direction, and this involves understanding
that racism and labour exploitation are intertwined totalities. Those who wish
to advance the debate and social struggles must therefore reflect on the
contemporary reality of the relationship between racism and the transfer of
value from the economies of peripheral countries to central countries.
We
must also consider the forms of ideological domination particular to nations
that were formed from domination based colonial expansion, and the structure of
the justifications that the dominant group produced (Moura, 2014a). It is unopposable
and urgent to consider the Brazilian working class in its specificities based
on the sexual and racial division of labour, and in its relationship with the
international division of labour.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Zelma de Araújo
Madeira. Worked on the writing,
critical review, and approval of the published version.
Social worker. Masters and Doctorate in sociology. Secretary
of Racial Equality for the State of Ceará. Professor of the Social Service
Course and the Masters Programme in Social Service, Labour,
and Social Issues at the State University of Ceará (UECE). Coordinator of the
Laboratório de Estudos e Pesquisas em Afrobrasilidades,
Gênero e Família (NUAFRO - UECE).
Daiane Daine de Oliveira
Gomes. Worked on the conception, design and
writing of the article.
Social worker. Masters in social work. PhD
student in the Social Work Programme at the Federal University of Rio Grande do
Norte (UFRN). Administrative Technician in Education as a social worker at
UFRN. Collaborating researcher at the Laboratório de Estudos e Pesquisas em Afrobrasilidades, Gênero e Família (NUAFRO - UECE).
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