Unintended consequences of job formalisation: Precarious work in Brazil’s sugarcane plantations

Abstract

This article focuses on the shift from informal to formal employment in the sugarcane plantations of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil, and its unintended consequences. Drawing on the employment experiences of sugarcane cutters, the authors stress the main mechanisms that produce precarity within formal employment structures. Precarity is forged by means of employers’ hiring practices, which turn formal employment contracts into insecure and temporary ones, disciplinary techniques used to control workers’ daily productivity within this labour-intensive production process, and the parasitic uses of the unemployment insurance system. While job formalisation has given access to more social protection, it has also created a permanently temporary workforce, which is rehired discontinuously by the plantations. The authors’ analysis of the link between formal employment, precarity and state protection more particularly leads to a reconsideration of Ulrich Beck’s ‘Brazilianization thesis’.