Last year, at 24, Sebastián Tol was a "champion" cane cutter on the agro-export plantations of Guatemala's Pacific coast, averaging over ten tons a day.* At the end of the harvest season, however, he returned home to the highlands with shoulder pain that made it difficult to do even routine chores. This year, his place on the plantation work crew was taken by his 18-year-old brother, Santiago, who also has hopes of becoming a champion. A month before the start of the harvest, Santiago began buying weekly vitamin injections for half a day's wage each, which he believes will increase his endurance in the cane fields.
The Guatemalan sugar industry tripled its production over the last two decades, and Guatemala is now the third-largest sugar exporter in Latin America. This expansion is due in large part to a modernization campaign designed to raise the productivity of cane cutters, most of whom are migrant workers from the indigenous highlands. Long infamous for using extreme violence to quell worker unrest, the sugar plantations in Guatemala are now devising alternate means to achieve labor discipline, by combining new technologies with wage incentives, human capital investments and a refashioning of workers' identities. Central to this strategy is the creation of a subset of "vanguard" cane cutters: young men generally between the ages of 18 and 25 who are pushed to compete with each other to reach productivity goals.
Indeed, productivity has soared across the sector. In 1980, cane workers were paid by the day and would cut between one and two tons per day; last year they were paid by the ton and the daily average among workers had risen to six tons. Productivity increases stem from a combination of technical changes and a social re-engineering of the harvest labor force. Technical changes include heavier, curved machetes, mechanical cane loading and the Taylorization of cane cutting, that is, the use of time-and-motion studies to break down the labor process into precise, repeatable movements. Taylorist methods control how a worker holds and swings the machete, and how many movements are used to cut and lay the cane. But plantation managers stress that, beyond these techniques, a key component is the effort to transform workers' attitudes toward cane cutting. The plantations' goal is to create new attitudes that they hope will undercut opposition to a labor regime that places increasingly severe demands on the bodies of workers.
One way this is done is through the masculinization of the harvest labor force. Industrial psychologists recruit and train the cane cutters, who are exclusively male and mostly young. Only men are permitted to live in the migrant camps. Food is prepared in industrial kitchens by male cooks, many of whom learned to cook while serving in the army. The new diets are supposed to provide 3,700 calories daily, and they include a careful balance of proteins and carbohydrates to ensure that workers don't lose weight during the harvest. Cane cutters get oral rehydration drinks and health exams. They are weighed periodically, and their muscles are measured. Their bodies and productivity levels are monitored, and all of this information gets recorded in year-by-year data bases.
The masculinization of harvest labor is not only about recruiting men, it's also about reinforcing ideas of masculinity among cane cutters. On the one hand, the mills try to create camaraderie in the work camps and a sense that these are spaces where workers can be free from family pressures. Many of the migrant camps have televisions and VCRs, and there are "entertainment nights" with Mexican vaquero films or Rambo movies. Exotic dancers are sometimes hired to perform at the camps, and at the end of the harvest, workers are taken on excursions to the beach or to a local cantina. The absence of older male relatives in the camps creates a sense of heightened freedom, a sort of extended adolescence, for younger workers, especially in a region like the coast that abounds with bars and brothels.
On the other hand, management appeals to machismo in its attempt to foment competition around production quotas. Top cane cutters are awarded prizes ranging from T-shirts to tape recorders, bicycles and a grand prize of a motorcycle. Every week management distributes a computer print-out of the top individual cane cutters and their scores. The "engineers," as workers call them, visit the housing camps regularly. "They tell us how great we are, and that we're ahead of all the other fronts," a 21-year-old worker told me. Another worker elaborated. "We're macho here. It's like at a fair, when they put a prize on top of a greased pole. Even though you know you can't reach it, you have to try."
In addition to the seemingly universal belief in the power of vitamin B injections, some cane cutters use amphetamines to extend their endurance. But when drugs are used to dull the effects of exhaustion and dehydration, heatstroke becomes a serious danger for workers in the sweltering cane fields. I asked a crew foreman why he thought many cane cutters were working themselves sick. "If you ask them," he said, "they'll probably tell you it's to get the wages, or maybe the prize. But I can tell you that a part of it has to do with the pure competition." The manipulation of masculinity to boost output doesn't erase workers' awareness of exploitation on the plantations, however. Cane cutters complain about the heat, the grueling hours and the belief that the plantations constantly cheat them out of their fair pay. "The prizes and all that, it's a bunch of crap," protested one worker with five years experience. "We're the ones who pay for it, with the money they steal from our pay. They give tape recorders, so what? If they would give out a little bit of land, now that would be worth working for!"
There hasn't been a major labor strike in the sugar sector since 1980, at the height of the civil war, and the sugar unions that existed in the 1970s disappeared with the repression. But temporary work stoppages are fairly common at many plantations, and worker turnover is high. Are cane workers "disciplined" by these practices? Many, like Sebastián Tol, pay a high price with broken bodies, but in general, workers' perceptions of the plantations appear to have changed little. The promotion of masculine work identities on the plantations doesn't make workers dislike cutting cane any less, and it doesn't seem to replace class consciousness. But when this is cross-cut by an emphasis on the recruitment of youth, it does create a separate group of workers for whom labor migration to the coast is a sort of multi-year rite of passage and a stepping stone toward aspirations of future U.S.-bound migration.
Sebastián Tol told me that he wasn't thinking of cutting sugar cane anymore. But he had heard from other workers from the coast that in Alabama there were many jobs "cutting chickens," and that if his shoulder would just heal he was going to try his luck in el norte.
*Sebastián and Santiago are the pseudonyms of two highlands brothers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Oglesby is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. She has lived and worked in Guatemala since the mid 1980s.
