Labour,
Restructuring of Production, and Development: A Point of View from Latin Americaork in a Sustainable Society
Ramalho, page 1 - 2 - 3
Labour,
Restructuring of Production, and Development:
A Point of View from Latin Americaork in a
Sustainable Society
Ramalho, page 1 - 2 - 3
by José Ricardo Ramalho
At the time of the 1995 Consultation, José Ricardo Ramalho a Lecturer on sociology of work, Department of Social Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was also a Member of the Directorate of NETS: Study Nucleus on Work and Society and the Brazilian coordinator of a comparative study on restructuring labour and work in contemporary societies conducted in Great Britain and Brazil. Section headings:
Innovative technological and management strategies derived from the so-called "Japanese model" (although they actually only exist in a few large companies in Japan itself) have been lauded as the solution to all the ills resulting from lack of competitiveness and difficulties in controlling the labour force. New management forms have been linked to the announcement of "modernity". In Brazil and other parts of Latin America they have been proclaimed as the inexorable road to be taken by industrial production. Concepts like "total quality," "just in time," etc. have suddenly become part of company vocabulary, forcing on workers a "civilizing" discourse on the need to keep up with the times. This article deals with issues relating to labour and economic development in the Brazilian and Latin American context, associating them with the debate on sustainable development. Based on recent restructuring of production, linked with the application of a neoliberal recipe virtually all over the continent, I discuss effects on the existing forms of labour, employment, the increase in poverty and social exclusion, and workers' organizations, trade unions, and social movements. Finally, I present several points for discussion concerning participation by labour and workers in a kind of development process that preserves natural resources, better distributes income, eradicates destitution, and maintains democratic forms of political organization, but which also admits real participation by social movements in drafting public policies and decisions on development strategies.
1. Labour and Industrial Restructuring Brazil and Latin America as a whole should be viewed in light of new production paradigms linked to the 1970s' capitalist accumulation crisis. What Piore and Sabel (1984) call "flexible specialization" challenges the model based on mass production of standardized goods, replacing it with the production of heterogeneous goods, with machines operated by specialized workers, capable of responding to market changes (Castro & Guimarces, 1990:209). Nevertheless, while the articulation of Brazil and other Latin American countries with the international market speeds up the effects of industrial restructuring, national, regional, and local specificities and socio-cultural characteristics interfere directly in strategies borrowed from other labour management experiences. Case studies in Brazil show a major heterogeneity between sectors and even between companies in a given industry; international market competition triggers modernization through export companies, but it does not reach the entire industrial park; modernization results from isolated actions, due in part to the government's lack of an industrial policy, but also due to company verticalization, deriving from industry's heterogeneity. The Brazilian case in fact shows that "reorganization of the industrial model in both the introduction of new technological standards and innovation in labour regimes, has been chasing after the facts in an uncommitted, contingent fashion." (Castro & Guimarces, 1990: 211, 215) Such a shortcoming has not prevented the gradual implementation of new entrepreneurial strategies whenever market opening - according to the neoliberal recipe - demands greater international competitiveness and places survival of domestic companies at risk. Out-sourcing has become widespread in Brazil. So-called "third-party" firms perform tasks that used to be carried out by the principal companies in the name of productivity and competitiveness. However, in an unskilled labour market with much available labour, such a cost savings has devastating effects on the job supply and those who depend on it for their survival. Existing studies on the use of out-sourcing (see Ramalho & Martins, 1994) describe the implementation of quality management technologies, proposing partnerships throughout the entire production flow - in relations with the market, suppliers, and employees. However, what still prevails in the Brazilian case is a kind of out-sourcing maintaining an antagonism with both employees and the trade union movement. The objective is to ensure short-term profits, where cost cutting is achieved by cutting labour (Faria, 1994:43).
The Brazilian out-sourcing process
relates directly to the issue of subcontracting. Within one same production area, there is
both a subcontracting process where technological and production management innovations
obtained by the subcontracting company are transferred to the subcontracted companies and
another, which Abreu & Sorj (1994) call "contingency subcontracting", where
the company transfers to the workers the costs of energy, equipment, and space, where the
base is a labour force without the burden of labour legislation. The dependency
established between the contracted and contracting parties "turns subcontracted
labour into a heavily ambiguous kind of occupation, combining certain characteristics of a
wage-earning relationship - like the imposition of what and how much a worker is supposed
to produce - with others typical of self-employed labour, like price negotiation, labour
performed outside the contractor's direct control, choice of production location, and free
distribution of time in manufacturing products." (Abreu & Sorj, 1994: 64-5)
In the context of restructuring, women's participation in the labour force and a simultaneous increase in at-home labour also deserve consideration. Data on female subemployment indicate that such labour is organized around a local market linking neighborhood relations and domestic sociability. Such subemployment tends to get labour and family dynamics mixed up, fails to organize forms of recognition referring to labour, and appears to transpire according to the natural cycle of life, under the aegis the need to help one's family. According to Telles (1994:98-99), "The absence of rights and the ill-defined nature of the labour relationship appear to shape a situation where differences between labour and non-labour are dissolved...and precarious labour appears natural as a kind of extension of domestic chores, helping supplement the family income." Participation in the labour market by working at home helps bolster the family budget and keeps women's domestic role intact. "This reinforces the ideology of domesticity, since by working in isolation, communicating intermittently and sporadically with her employer, with no chance of a career or promotion, ignored by trade unions and excluded from the social benefits enjoyed by wage-earning workers, women have tremendous difficulty in distinguishing their professional identity from that of wife and mother." (Abreu & Sorj, 1993:61) Labour at home is an essential part of the restructuring process. As in the Industrial Revolution, entire families use household space as production space, the workday has no time to start or finish, and management relations get mixed up with those of family authority. Adding to all this is the demand for high product quality. There is a great diversity of situations in household labour. In the case of the Brazilian shoe industry (Ruas, 1993:40), which makes intensive use of this type of labour, it is still quite precarious, with a predominance of unskilled labour and a rudimentary technological base. Unlike the subcontracting networks developed under "flexible specialization", with emphasis on quality and flexibility, in the households linked to the shoe industry the relationship is generally predatory. In the Rio de Janeiro textile industry, household labour is essentially female and invisible, due to the precarious official statistics. In Brazil, since household workers do not have signed working papers like other company workers, and since social rights are not guaranteed by the employer, companies transfer social costs to the seamstresses by requiring that they obtain a self-employed worker's card, making the relationship one of purchase and sale of services by independent manufacturers (Abreu & Sorj, 1993:45-46).
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