On his first day in office in 2019, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, closed the country’s Ministry of Labour and Employment, fulfilling his campaign pledge to the agribusiness lobby to reverse worker gains made under the Workers’ Party between 2003 and 2016. While Bolsonaro’s assault on environmental regulations and institutions rightly received global attention, there has been less focus on his attacks on Brazil’s labor institutions and policies—policies that had long complemented environmental regulation because efforts to curb labor exploitation in agribusiness also constrained environmental exploitation. Recognizing this synergy, Bolsonaro and agribusiness leaders saw closing the Ministry of Labour as a means of removing protections for both labor and the environment.
In my research on Brazil’s sugar-ethanol industry, I observed how labor and environmental processes interact to shape the social relations of production, relationships I call the labor-environment nexus. Sugar-ethanol’s system of commodity production is rife with environmentally hazardous labor at racially stratified work sites, where Black and Brown workers do entry-level tasks and Whites occupy managerial positions. During 18 months of fieldwork in 2015 and 2019, I interviewed nearly 150 sugar-ethanol industry elites, federal labor regulators, rural union leaders, and rural workers. I explored how race, work, and the environment intersected in the production of sugar-ethanol, a commodity touted in Brazil and globally as a supposed tool for fighting climate change.
Two things leapt out from those interviews. Pro-worker policies, though colorblind, would promote economic justice for the non-White workforce. Equally obvious, however, was the converse dynamic: an elite reactionary backlash to policies for equity and sustainability in sugar-ethanol was animated by the threat to privilege rooted in race and class. For elites, Bolsonaro would be a useful vehicle for rolling back labor regulations that had empowered workers of color.
While environmental sociologists have noted that racial domination and environmental engineering go hand-in-hand, pointing to Indigenous land dispossession and genocide (Norgaard et al. 2018), in this essay I highlight the role of work and employment. I analyze how White elites maintain their power and wealth through racialized labor processes and exploitative environmental practices in the sugar-ethanol mills and plantations of northeast Brazil.
Elite Patrimonialism and the Labor-Environment Nexus
In the sugarcane industry, the labor-environment nexus has been racialized since the 1500s. During colonization, European planters enslaved African and Indigenous people to deforest native vegetation, plant and harvest sugarcane, and ground cane into sugar. Although slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, sharecropping persisted into the 21st century. Power and status in the sugarcane industry still operate along race and skin-color lines today.
The dynastic interests of White elite families have long anchored strategies for sugarcane production, with a patrimonial worldview guiding business decisions. Patrimonialism is a ruling ideology that rests on three pillars: unrivaled patriarchal authority; the inviolable power of the private family; and clientelistic relations between public entities and private households. Patrimonialism not only solidifies hierarchies of race, class, and gender on plantations, it also seeks to enshrine those principles in the broader society.
Control over the labor-environment nexus is central to the patrimonial worldview. A cherished privilege among elites is the power to command—mandonismo in Portuguese, referring to the seignorial authority to dominate subordinates (often defined by race, class, and gender) and to freely exploit environmental resources (including land, air, water, and animals). The power to command is an elevated virtue, which patrimonial elites consider essential to binding society, environment, and economy in a moral order (Rogers 2012).
Challenging Elite Patrimonialism through Federal Anti-Slave Task Forces
In the mid-1990s, preceding Workers’ Party rule, a shift in Brazil’s labor enforcement system challenged the long-held authority and autonomy of agribusiness elites. Federal task forces seeking to eliminate modern-day slavery strengthened enforcement around human rights, child labor, informal work, and environmental exploitation (such as deforestation). This federal intervention critically undermined patrimonial control by constraining the private power of elites and expanding universal legal principles.
In interviews I conducted, federal labor inspectors, prosecutors, and judges who were instrumental in these activities described the violence they faced from plantation owners, including threats of armed assaults on plantations and fear of road ambushes staged to look like accidents. These threats were not imaginary. In 2004, a plantation owner murdered four Ministry of Labour and Employment officials who arrived to inspect cases of enslaved workers.
Anti-slavery actions upended longstanding racialized hierarchies on plantations. Although anti-slave enforcement did not have an explicit focus on race or skin color, the demographic profile of rescued workers reveals the racialized dynamic of enslavement. White workers made up only 23 percent of all rescued workers, while workers of color (Black, Brown/mixed race, Indigenous, and Asian) constituted 76 percent of all rescued workers; the former were underrepresented and the latter overrepresented compared to the national population.
Labor inspectors, prosecutors, and judges described how these enforcement efforts entailed creating new institutional and legal norms and establishing a federal bureaucratic presence in rural work sites. These anti-slave task forces were instrumental not only for combatting labor and environmental exploitation in the Brazilian interior, but also for institutionalizing protocols that could be extended throughout the agribusiness sector.
Extending Labor Enforcement into Sugar-Ethanol Production
In the early 2000s, federal labor regulators expanded their efforts beyond slavery in the Amazon and into traditional areas of sugar-ethanol production. A mission for regulators was to bring oversight to manual harvesting and straw burning, the primary labor-environment nexus in sugar-ethanol. In the mills and plantations of Brazil’s northeast, producers flash-burn sugarcane fields to incinerate straw and weeds, allowing cane-cutters to access the stalk more easily with their machetes. This has immediate impact on productivity: a cane-cutter who goes into a burnt cane field can cut 12 tons in a day, compared to only three tons that can be harvested from a field of unburned cane. This production strategy is also associated with three pernicious processes: public health injuries as a result of air pollution; climate damages through toxic emissions; and brutal work that often results in early death.
As part of their expanded efforts into regulating sugar-ethanol production, the Ministry of Labour and Employment, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and the federal Labor Courts focused on typical labor issues: health and safety, non-payment of wages, and employer tax evasion. Inspectors prioritized registering workers, granting formal work cards, and ensuring key benefits, such as: an official minimum wage; contributions to social security; unemployment insurance; an annual salary bonus; and holiday pay (Moraes, Oliveira, and Kretzmann 2012). As research by Coslovsky and Locke (2013) and myself (2017) shows, new labor laws, particularly regulatory norms (normas regulamentadoras)related to health and safety, targeted rural work including mills and plantations. Additionally, judicial rulings from 2000 onward increasingly favored worker rights, including the court decision TST-331, which banned third-party outsourcing in supply chains (Biavaschi and Droppa 2011). In general, worksite standards were steadily strengthened, with regulations requiring hygienic dormitories and bathrooms, protective work gear, safe transportation, designated break areas and periods, and clean water (Carrillo 2021). These changes reconfigured the labor-environment nexus by conferring significant protections and benefits to rural workers of color and diminishing elites’ power to command.
Regulatory pressures to end straw burning posed a particular threat to elite racial domination. In a recent article, I explain how elites view straw burning through a racial prism. One mill director repeated a common defense of straw burning that revealed how racial panic and criminal stereotypes shaped elite views of the practice. He warned that requiring plantations to cut cane without burning would vastly decrease productivity, reduce profitability, and likely result in the closure of mills and plantations. For him, mills and plantations function as a “security belt” by generating agricultural work that disciplines rural workers of color, who are perceived to have innate criminal tendencies. The director stated that, should mills and plantations close, urban areas would be inundated with jobless rural workers who would commit acts of mass murder that the police would be helpless to control.
Elites in Brazil have long wielded the threat of mass starvation as a political weapon to dominate rural workers of color, from slavery to sharecropping. Elites now invoke hunger to defend straw burning, suggesting that mill and plantation closure would cause mass starvation among rural workers. One elite described how working “in cane is better than to go starving,” while another justified sugarcane employment by saying, “…these people (rural workers) need to eat. Perhaps not three times a day, but at least two times. You have to eat to not die.” Elites use the threat of starvation to coerce rural workers into an environmentally hazardous labor regime, while also using the threat of mass criminality to ensure the regime’s continuation.
While these rationalizations of straw burning reveal how racial ideology binds together the labor-environment nexus, they also show the depth and scope of reactionary elite responses to pro-worker and pro-environmental legislation in sugar-ethanol production. In the lead-up to the 2018 presidential election, then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro connected strongly with agribusiness leaders by villainizing the labor inspectors, prosecutors, and judges responsible for enforcing progressive legislation. Like their counterparts across the agribusiness sector, sugar-ethanol elites saw Bolsonaro as an instrument for restoring the patrimonial power they felt they had lost over the previous two decades.
Undoing Rationalization, Restoring Patrimonialism
During an interview in spring 2019, at the beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidency, I asked the director of a sugar-ethanol company if he anticipated more favorable labor policies under the new regime. Complaining that he was tired of businessmen being treated like “villains” during the Worker’s Party years, he said he simply hoped for “fairer” labor policies. This opinion was an understatement, given the sustained assault against labor regulators and regulations that was already underway.
In May 2016, the Brazilian congress voted to impeach Worker’s Party president Dilma Rousseff. As I heard from an agribusiness leader in 2015, impeaching Rousseff was necessary to reconfigure worker laws and address the rampant vagrancy (vagabundagem) in Brazil. In 2017, interim President Michel Temer passed a massive labor reform, significantly weakening worker rights and protections. Congressional leaders sympathetic to agribusiness also sought to change the legal definition of work analogous to slavery to weaken the reach of previous pro-worker reforms.
Since taking office, Bolsonaro has consistently worked to further undermine labor regulations. In addition to closing the Ministry of Labour and transferring remaining functions to the Ministry of the Economy (headed by the neoliberal minister Paulo Guedes), Bolsonaro has hamstrung labor inspectors by reducing operating budgets, pressuring for early retirements, and cancelling civil service exams to recruit new entrants. Bolsonaro has also demonized federal labor prosecutors, saying that “a country that has a Public Prosecutor’s Office trampling things has no path forward” and that he’ll “take the State off the producers’ throat.”
In interviews, labor regulators expressed dismay that their decades of intricate and painstaking work to build bureaucratic capacity, establish institutional norms, and set legal standards were rapidly being torn apart. Intimately aware of agribusiness leaders’ nostalgia for authoritarian rule, regulators anticipated that labor and environmental exploitation would likely return and that rural workers of color would have little leverage with which to defend themselves.
The Labor-Environment Nexus as a Site of Racial Struggle
The labor-environment nexus in agribusiness has played an important role in the pendulum swing in Brazil’s political economy—from progressive to the illiberal right. For patrimonial elites, racial and class domination is achieved through coercive work involving environmental manipulation. Rural elites sit atop a human and nonhuman hierarchy, with subjects arranged in a “moral order”—a system that has remained intact in northeast Brazil for centuries.
Although the recent assault on federal labor regulators, particularly those in the Ministry of Labour, has been gut-wrenching, the last 20-plus years of labor enforcement in agribusiness have shown the absolute necessity of coupling robust pro-worker policies with pro-environment policies. Given the general racialization of environmentally hazardous employment and the fact that the worst forms of labor exploitation disproportionately involve workers of color, pro-worker policies have proved to be a powerful instrument for promoting the dual goals of economic and racial justice. As recent reactions by Brazil’s plantation elite remind us, such policies can indeed strike at the heart of unequal power relations and engender structural change.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
