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June 10, 2010

The Big Farm

Brazilians sometimes refer to Belo Horizonte as “a roça grande,” or “the big farm,” a metaphor that captures the city’s large size as well its rural vibe.  More than six million people live in Belo Horzonte’s metropolitan region, making it Brazil’s third largest urban area behind São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.  Despite the city’s substantial population, a rustic undercurrent seems to emanate from its soothing mountain setting and its warm, friendly people, many of whom have migrated here from the neighboring farming communities that dot Minas Gerais’s countryside.  Indeed, over the years, waves of peasants have come to the “big city” looking for work and for opportunities to advance.

A Sharper Edge

Ironically, numerous rural transplants—and often their children and grandchildren—have found themselves living precisely on the city’s sharper edge: in “favelas” (slums or shantytowns) or “na periferia” (on the outskirts).  For the sake of opportunity, many have left behind spacious fresh-air communities to settle into tiny brick houses, or “barracos,” in the city’s more congested impoverished areas.  Clearly, such settlers were not enjoying ideal bucolic lives previously.  Work in their native communities likely had been extremely limited, but they may have experienced less violence, less social stigma and less discrimination compared to what they now confront in their new lives.  It’s a complicated tradeoff.  Like Brazil’s other largest cities, Belo Horizonte suffers from a pernicious drug trafficking presence, particularly in its favelas.  Adding poverty and overcrowded spaces to the mix, the ingredients tend to produce increased violence.  Furthermore, Belo Horizonte’s wealthiest communities often sit immediately adjacent to its poorest slums.  Such polar juxtapositions, which highlight Brazil’s marked income disparity, create settings that reinforce social divisions and stigmas.  Finally, and unfortunately, Brazil’s (and Belo Horizonte’s) favelas and periferias contain a disproportionate number of people of color, a factor that likely intensifies discrimination issues.  To be clear: the story of Belo Horizonte’s working class is not exclusively an account of people with rural origins.  Some have come from mid-sized industrial towns (e.g. Governador Valadares), others from large metropolises (e.g. São Paulo), and many have been living in Belo Horizonte’s favelas and on its outskirts all along.

Surviving on Minimum Wage?

Regardless of their origins, poor urban workers in the city’s favelas and periferias tend to show remarkable resilience and admirable drive in their fight to make ends meet and get ahead.  Rather than resorting to relatively easy short-term solutions—such as dealing drugs, stealing or idly living off others—working class men and women have opted to put in long hours for minimum wages, or sometimes less.  Brazil’s minimum wage in 2009, R$465 per month, equates to roughly US$2,400 per year based on exchange rates at February 1, 2009.  Framing Brazil’s paltry minimum salary in US dollar terms provides perspective, but does not represent an apples-to-apples comparison.  Brazil’s cost of living is meaningfully lower than that of the United States.  A more instructive analysis, therefore, looks at what a minimum salary can buy in Brazil in 2009.  Article 7º-IV of Brazil’s federal constitution defines by law that a minimum salary should cover the “vital basic needs” of a worker and his/her family, including: “living arrangements, alimentation, education, health care, leisure, clothing, hygiene, transportation and social security.”

It seems difficult, if not impossible, to stretch today’s minimum salary far enough to meet the government’s objective.  For the moment, consider outlays for food only.  In 1938, the Brazilian government defined a basic basket (“cesta basica”) of thirteen food products and corresponding quantities deemed sufficient to feed a family during a one month period.  DIEESE, a pioneering Brazilian organization, has performed insightful research on monthly costs associated with the government-defined cesta basica.  For example, DIEESE estimates that a minimum-wage laborer living in Belo Horizonte had to work more than one hundred hours in February 2009 to cover food expenses alone for that month’s cesta basica:

Belo Horizonte – Cesta BasicaFebruary 2009
Product	Quantity	Monthly Outlay (R$)	Hours of Work*
Meat	6 kg	75.60	35h46m
Milk	7.5 l	14.03	6h38m
Beans	4.5 kg	15.75	7h27m
Rice	3 kg	6.15	2h55m
Flour	1.5 kg	3.32	1h34m
Potatoes	6 kg	9.78	4h38m
Tomatoes	9 kg	21.51	10h11m
Bread	6 kg	35.58	16h50m
Coffee	600 g	5.83	2h45m
Bananas	7.5 dz	11.55	5h28m
Sugar	3 kg	3.60	1h42m
Oil	900 ml	2.59	1h14m
Bread	750 g	11.98	5h40m
Basket total:		217.27	102h48m
* Hours of work that a minimum wage laborer must put in to buy essential rations.
Source: DIIESE (http://www.dieese.org.br/rel/rac/cesta.xml)

If we assume a minimum wage laborer worked 168 total hours in February 2009, roughly 60% of his/her labor went to pay for basic alimentation, not sparing much for: “living arrangements, education, health care, leisure, clothing, hygiene, transportation and social security.”  Indeed, DIEESE estimates that a family requires a monthly salary of approximately R$2,000 to comfortably meet all of their basic monthly needs (nearly 4.5x higher than the actual R$465 minimum salary in place during February 2009).  Based on DIEESE’s important work, as well as that of other groups, questions come to mind.  How does a minimum wage earner, or even someone earning multiples of the minimum wage, pay rent?  Raise a family?  Purchase a house?  Set aside money to invest in education? Save for retirement? Solutions tend not to come easily or without consequences.  For example, some people may work double shifts, others two jobs, some families may share cramped living quarters to reduce rent costs and some parents may even put young children to work to help with expenses.

Fighting on the Outskirts

So it is with this backdrop that we present our project, “Lutando na Periferia,” or literally “Fighting on the Outskirts,” which captures the stories and spirit of working men and women from Belo Horizonte’s favelas and periferias.  During 2005 and 2006, we interviewed numerous such individuals to better understand their challenges, day-to-day work stories, life perspectives and family backgrounds.  Everyone we spoke to earned less than 4.5x Brazil’s minimum wage, which corresponds roughly to the salary that DIEESE shows would be appropriate for a family to meet basic needs. Each profile varies in length, content and style and we do not provide any academic analysis here; rather, we let these stories stand on their own and leave them open to interpretation.  This project highlights human resilience and people’s ability to overcome challenges such as hunger, financial distress, child labor, absentee parents, violence, crime, drugs, alcohol, insufficient education, and social and racial discrimination, among other obstacles.  These oral histories, ranging from conversations with a young man who rummages through trash to support his family to discussions with a police officer trying to make it out of the slums, humanize cold statistics associated with income disparity in Brazil.

Social themes aside, this project really boils down to merely a collection of bits and pieces from personal life stories: brief incomplete snapshots that readers nonetheless can reflect on and learn from.

Our goal is to give voice to the working poor, who typically don’t have opportunities to share their stories with wider audiences.  Beyond presenting what we believe are intriguing life accounts, this project hopefully broadens our readers’ social awareness of what takes place in other parts of the world.  Ideally, some might consider making a donation to one of several independent non-profit organizations (e.g. BrazilFoundation) that aim to improve the lives of the underprivileged .  At minimum, we believe this project validates the words of English novelist Charles Reade:

“Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows.”

Please send direct inquiries, comments or questions to: lutando.project@gmail.com