What is it about?
Drawing from case file records generated in rural labour courts in Brazil’s north-eastern state of Pernambuco between 1965 and 1982, this paper demonstrates how these forums reified class-based exploitation, even as they purportedly protected workers’ rights. The paper focuses on two districts in the state’s sugarcane-growing region, both of which reveal a clear pattern of inferior treatment for rural as opposed to non-rural workers. Interpreting the evidence as a function of long-term patterns of social and economic relations in the region, the paper also sets this case in a larger context of rural labour history around the world.
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Why is it important?
We based our paper on several hundreds of cases in Labour Tribunals, in the sugar cane area of Pernambuco.
Perspectives
It was very important and challenging to write this paper with a young colleague and brillant brasilianist, Professor at Emory University,Thomas Rogers, who, as a PhD student, helped us (History Department at the Federal University of Pernambuco) save the archives on which we based this research.
Christine Dabat
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sugarcane Workers in Search of Justice: Rural Labour through the Lens of the State, International Review of Social History, January 2018, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s002085901700058x.
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