Ceifando a cana... Tecendo a vida. Um estudo sobre o pós/trabalho nos canaviais

Abstract

The goal of this research was to understand the post/work of unhealthy retired sugarcane cutters that is the new sociability network, where they are embraced. We employed qualitative methods with direct and unsystematic observations, semi-structured script interviews, photodocumentation and field research. Cane cutters are mostly migrants; when they get sick, they often return to their hometown. Therefore, the empirical field of this research is a place of origin of these workers, Araçuaí city in Jequitinhonha Vale/MG, where exist an intense migratory flow to the sugarcane plantations of São Paulo state. Unhealthy cane cutters were interviewed, such as their relatives and professionals who work with these persons – medical doctors, social workers and psychologists of the Social Security services and Brazilian health system (SUS). Cutting cane is a physically and emotionally exhausting job that could cause disease. They are discharged by the agro-ethanol industry, because their bodies and minds cannot support the work anymore, since their labor capacity is affected by the disease symptoms. If, according to the Marxian interpretation, the work organizes sociability of the subjects, their capitalist expression - the sale of the labor force - establishes estranged relations, even more so in a situation of overexploitation. What, then, does the illness produce? The subject does not have the labor force to exchange, but remains immersed in estranged relations. In the post/work the estrangement intensifies, because the restrained relations remain, the workers are understood as a discarded commodity. Discarding generates a sense of shame shared among the subjects. The unhealthy sugarcane cutters seek in the State the means to ensure their reproduction. State institutions play the regulatory role in biopolitics, expressing “to make live and let die”. Discarded sugar cane cutters do not fit the labor norm, that is, they cannot execute the function that they were become docile: that of labor power. They establish a new sociability with social workers, physicians and psychologists from social security and welfare agencies. The State acts permit that one to believe that discarded persons of the cane are left to die - not only physical but social death – since their lives are not more managed and controlled. The family is impacted in this process, not only by the loss of a significant income in the budget, but also because it has repercussions on the results of deep estrangement. Women - wives and mothers - become in charge of caring for these sick men, dealing with the difficulties this role entails. In a patriarchal society, women are given care, which in the case of the wives and mothers of sugarcane cutters is intensified, inasmuch as they must also take care of this sick person. Men, on the other hand, are attributed to masculinity, virility and strength, naturalization that fractures with illness. Gender relations reorganize, but not with the inversion of the poles of power. The subjects do not passively experience any of these processes, producing different strategies of resistance, lines of escape to the imposed impositions. The cane cutter - expropriated migrant, overexploited labor force, split generic being - establishes new relationships of sociability in post/work by disease. In this way, we can affirm that capitalist sociability extends out of space-time of work. For the Sociology of Work, specifically those who study rural work, it is possible, from the present reflection, to broaden the field of studies. The end of the work relations constitutes, as seen in the case of the discarded cane cutters, another sociability related exactly to the space-time of work, inaugurates the post/work, theme not different, but belonging to the Sociology of Work.