The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

84 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
pendent large farmers by 1974. Faced with serious labor unrest and
the need to expand production as never before—to fill the gap in the
U.S. sugar import quota subsequent to the embargo on Cuban sugar—the
Cauca Valley cane growers stimulated the development of a
labor contractor system, by which formally independent intermediaries
are paid to recruit small gangs of casual workers for set tasks.
Around a third of the workers on the sugar plantations and nearly
all those on the large farms are recruited and supervised by labor
contractors. These contractors can largely avoid the costly social security
benefits and can pay even lower rates than the agribusinesses
pay permanent workers. Casual labor like this cannot form or join
trade unions; thus, they are often employed to break strikes. The
contracting system atomizes the work force, facilitates the control
of workers, lowers the overall labor bill, undermines the political
strength of all workers, causal or permanent, and helps ensure an
elastic reservoir of labor to cope with fluctuations in demand—a
fluctuation that is very marked even in the sugar industry.
Ease of recruitment and organization of contracted labor relies
heavily on the co-optation of existing social networks among the
poor. The hidden source of strength of the contracting system is the
capacity of poor people to organize themselves into wage-working
gangs. The efficient harnessing of labor to the labor market is indebted
to nonmarket modes of social relationships. Furthermore,
the contracting system facilitates the predominance of the piecework
system in capitalist agriculture, which in turn bolsters the
contractor system. Compared with a time-work system of payment,
the piecework system allows the employer far more opportunity to
wear down the daily wage, to intensify labor, and to heighten the individualism
and competition among the workers. This creates a
vicious circle in which the lowering of the daily rate makes the
piecework mode of payment and the contracting system more appealing
to the workers. Since they are unable to act collectively on
the wage structure, the workers at least have in the contractor piecework
system the chance of exceeding daily rates by intensifying
their labor. And, because many of the contracted workers prefer to
move back and forth between the peasant sphere and the plantations,
the contractor system becomes more appealing. A plantation
ditchdigger who was paid by the cubic meter dug relates:
With food prices so high and wages so low, workers are forced
to work their very hardest to make ends meet. Some don't
even stop for lunch. When a man fell down with stomach
pains the other day, a Saturday, the others barely paid him any