A cadeia produtiva como empregador em casos de trabalho análogo ao de escravo: um estudo a partir do setor cafeeiro

Abstract

This thesis is developed around three main points: contemporary slave labour as a persistent reality in Brazilian society; the limitations of labour law protection within the context of productive decentralization; and the figure of the employer. To understand them, the study first presents data quantifying documented slave labour in recent Brazil, observing race, educational level, gender, and age, as well as the activities with the highest numbers of rescues and the modalities that characterize this crime. Next, in the second chapter, an in-depth study is conducted on the formation of Brazilian coffee farming, whose centrality in the historical, sociological, and economic development of Brazil is unavoidable, while at the same time currently placing the country as the world’s largest coffee exporter and positioning the coffee sector among those that most exploit workers through slave labour. Based on this study, the third chapter develops an analysis of the Brazilian coffee production chain as a paradigmatic example of the organizational logic of globalized production chains, formed by the centralization of economic power and the fragmentation of risks and responsibilities; followed by an analysis of the labour arrangements manifested within this productive organization. In view of the various forms of labour precarization identified in this study, the fourth chapter turns to the understanding of labour liability and to the importance of comprehending risk as a structural element of the legal notion of employer. After this trajectory, the fifth and final chapter focuses on understanding the processes of delocalization and productive decentralization in the context of globalization, aiming at a broader comprehension of what was analyzed within the Brazilian coffee production chain. In this chapter, based on the reflections of Oscar Uriarte, the notion of employer is questioned, and the need to restore the centrality of labour law and universal human rights is discussed, in order to better understand labour relations in contemporary society, starting from the concept of the complex employer, an economic entity that unifies labour responsibility within the framework of productive decentralization. From this perspective, the final part of the fifth chapter proposes an immediate and territorially grounded response, considering the 1988 brazilian Constitution and the principled framework of labour law, which synthesizes the present thesis: the labour liability of the production chain in cases of slave labour within it.