ABSTRACT
The "slavery done for someone else" is what has increased in recent years. Family labour, as a proportion of the total agricultural workforce, grew from 54 per cent in 1950 to over 80 per cent by 1970. Sixteen and a half per cent, nearly three million of them, were children aged under 14 - and those numbers have continued to grow. The Agricultural Census in Brazil recorded 4,581,500 working children by 1975, with 68 per cent working more than forty hours a week. In sugar plantations north and south I saw armies of children as young as 6 years old slowly slashing their way through the passive opposition of cane, which stands twice their height. Most work with their parents, but by the age of 12 Jose was on the labour gang and picked up by the "cat", the labour contractor who helps himself to up to half his real earnings, at 6 every morning. Patterns vary from one part of Brazil's vastness to another, but certain trends are common: the increasing polarization of rich and poor, and the loss of land among the poor, exacerbated by the presence of large families. Many minifundios (smallholdings) have been broken up and can no longer support the family, so they all need to go to work as boias-frias (temporary wage labourers):
The growth of employment on a piecework basis - empreitada
- the characteristic form which encourages the incorporation of unpaid child labour within wage labour - is seen as the most rationalised form of seasonal wage-labour arrangements which may spread as agriculture becomes modernised. . . . The use of child labour - paid and unpaid - must be seen in terms of other processes linked to the differentiation of the peasantry: high levels of indebtedness, land fragmentation and growth of sharecropping, and environmental degradation.2
