Family, work and rationalisation: the reconfiguration of the housing spaces in a sugar mill in the 1960s-1960s

Abstract

The management of workforce assumes various conigurations. In speciic contexts, the emergence of some structures expanded the relation between capital and labor beyond the objective conditions. Such context emerged in the areas of sugarcane production in the São Paulo State countryside, Brazil, between 1960 and 1990. In one of the world’s largest sugar and ethanol mills – the São Martinho Mill – the granting of housing, the appropriation of family labor and the relationship between employers and employees took on a distinct, multifaceted logic, far from what is commonly found in the universe of rural world. The present study is the result of ield research in which we retrieve the trajectory of workers whose families have been linked for generations to the São Martinho Mill. We sought to highlight the particularity of the relations established there in within a speciic time cut, the perception of these relations between the workers and the reasons that led to inevitable disappearance of such relations.