Economia

This is a study of the role of the wage and labor policies in the determination of the wages of manufacturing workers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, under the military governments from 1964 to 1978. It is motivated by the worsening of the position of urban workers in the income distribution between 1960 and 1970. Chapter I presents the political and economic events of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as an historical background to the period. Chapter II analyzes the Brazilian industrial relations structure and focuses on issues relevant to wage determination, including the state-sponsored system of unions, the effective prohibition on strikes, the absence of a job security system, the interaction between the individual and collective labor contracts, and forced turnover rotatividade policies by the employers. Chapter III discusses the government's collective wage adjustment and minimum wage policies in the context of the inflationary economic environment, the Brazilian indexation system, and wage indexation systems in the Western industrial countries. It considers the impact on wages of technical aspects in the construction of a wage indexation system, including the choice of data and the manipulation of price indexes, and also the practical problems of empirical research in an inflationary economic environment. Chapter IV reviews the literature on income distribution, wage determination, and wage policy in Brazil, focusing on the use of information from the wage policies as "proxies," "benchmarks," and explanatory variables in the analysis of wage movements. Chapter V is an empirical study of long-run wage drift and changes in wage differentials in Sao Paulo manufacturing by industry, size of firm, and Brazilian versus multinational firms. Chapter VI measures the short-run impact elasticity of the two wage policies on wage changes using a monthly-data regression model. It is concluded the wage policies had limited impact on workers' wages relative to market forces after the 1965-1967 "wage squeeze" period because of the low real value of the minimum wage and the active labor markets as evidenced by high rates of job changing in the case of the collective wage adjustment. It is believed, however, that the set of labor and wage policies together contributed to the decline in wages and worsening of income distribution and set the stage for the continued worsening after the mid-1960s through unrestrained market activity.

Sidewalk vendors occupy a peculiar place in contemporary urban landscapes. They are ubiquitous in many large cities of the world. Yet, they often maintain ambiguous positions in physical, cultural, political and socioeconomic spaces simultaneously. São Paulo, Brazil is no exception. My dissertation examines the ways camelôs, as vendors are often called in Brazil, navigate the material and symbolic spaces in which they operate. Focusing on the experiences, interactions, conversations and practices of a group of camelôs, the dissertation explores the relationship between work, identity, space and citizenship in contemporary São Paulo. I argue that the ambiguity engendered by camelôs' work practices and everyday experiences, in relation to various realms of social life, forces us to rethink the role of work in the formation of modern subjects and the obligations of the State in the contemporary world. The dissertation illustrates how vendors' economic practices reside at the interstices of categories like legality and illegality, public and private space, employment and unemployment. In contrast to traditional understandings of an "informal economy" then, I suggest that the work practices of unlicensed sidewalk vendors in Brazil, and elsewhere, may be better understood as constituting a set of interstitial work practices. The bulk of the dissertation explores how the liminal aspects of their work foster a constant uncertainty in vendors' everyday experiences, in spite of their relatively mundane labor routines. Descriptions of such routines provide the context to analyze the interactions camelôs have with each other, with pedestrian-clients, and with city agents—particularly police and tax collectors—and local governments who attempt to regulate their work. Contextualizing the research historically, the penultimate chapter sketches a genealogy of "interstitial work practices" in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities from colonial times through the 20th century. The dissertation concludes by elaborating the concept of interstitial work further by considering unlicensed sidewalk vending as an economic, spatial, social, cultural, aesthetic, political and historically situated work practice. Furthermore, the final analysis paves the way for re-thinking studies on the informal economy as well as recent research on cities and citizenship that take struggles around housing as their primary focus.

This study examines economic forces contributing toward the current shifts in manufacturing production away from Metropolitan São Paulo in São Paulo state. Locational pressures on manufacturing plants are explored in terms of the trade-off between productivity advantages due to lower wages in outlying areas. Spatial variations in productivity are examined using data for new manufacturing plants in Sao Paulo state. The analysis suggests that Metropolitan Sao Paulo has substantial agglomeration economies which enhance plant productivity. But, analysis of spatial variations in wages in Sao Paulo state shows that wages are substantially lower outside the metropolitan region, and result in substantially lower labor costs for plants in outlying regions. Comparison of the productivity advantages of central areas with the general face an even locational trade-off. The trend of industrial decentralization is consistent with this estimated trade-off. Because industrial decentralization is under way in Sao Paulo state without direct public intervention and, as much as this study could determine, without major distortions to market signals, no further policy intervention is recommend. Procedures for further encouraging the efficient decentralization of industry, nonetheless, are identified.

This study used Hofstede's (1980) Value Survey Module to compare culture and Hackman and Oldham's (1980) intrinsic motivation six-item measure to compare motivation to work between hotel employees in Northeast and Southeast Brazil. The results of this study showed there are significant cultural differences between the two regions. These differences are correlated to motivation. Sub cultural differences found between Northeast and Southeast Brazil require that training contents and organizational culture differ between the regions since employees' values and needs and values are not the same. The correlation between culture and motivation suggests that cultural differences may be used by managers as a tool to motivate their employees. If employees value different things they are therefore motivated by different things as well, for values are the driving forces of action.