ABSTRACT
Rigidity of the slave workforce means the following: the number of arms of the workforce remains unaltered despite variations in the amount of work demanded by the various seasonal or circumstantial phases of production. The agrarian nature of the economy obviously contributed to increase the rigidity of the slave workforce. The opposite occurs with a capitalist economy. The capitalist entrepreneur maintains a contractual relation with his workers that can be rescinded at any time. Coffee plantations also reproduced the model of sugar plantations, with no advancements toward specialization in order to eliminate what people call support tasks. Transporting the coffee down the sierra, which was indispensable for any plantation, was done with mule caravans – only much later substituted by rail transport – and consumed one-fifth of the male slave workforce serving as muleteers most of the year. The problem of the workforce necessary during the peak of the production process was particularly complex in sugarcane plantations.
