The Middle-Class Glass Ceiling in the Postwar Era

This chapter explores working Paulistanos’ access to good jobs and the limits to mobility in the 1920s. By the end of the Old Republic, laborers and liberal professionals comprised São Paulo’s middle class, and a segmented labor market existed with good jobs in commerce, transportation, and the mechanical sector and bad jobs in the textile sector. Interview transcripts and worker profiles show workers valued a high salary, opportunities for training and advancement, and family employment. Established residents and new residents, who were internal migrants, Eastern Europeans, or immigrants from other Southern Cone ports, vied for these good jobs. Despite tightening immigration regulations and increasing cost of living, the city doubled in size. Not everyone had equal access to these positions: a good appearance and the right connections facilitated entry, placing individuals coming directly from the lavoura, who could not afford the city’s overpriced clothing, women, and Afro-Brazilians increasingly at a disadvantage. The search for housing compounded disadvantages, and the working class increasingly built outward, expanding São Paulo’s footprint into the city’s floodplains. The Great Flood of 1929 demonstrated the precariousness of success and limits of opportunity as flood victims sought refuge in the Hospedaria.

Nonstriking Workers and São Paulo’s Sindicato Amarelo

This chapter analyzes why São Paulo’s labor organization was weak prior to World War I. It breaks with traditional explorations into organizers, focusing instead on how industrialist interests and state interventions intersected with the motivations and experiences of rank-and-file and non-striking workers. Prior to the 1917 General Strike, industrialists relied on the state’s increasing willingness to provide police intervention and intimidation to guarantee the “freedom to work.” When these measures proved insufficient and strikes persisted, employers could and did look to the Hospedaria to provide replacement workers. Industrialist interests and the state’s willingness to intervene on industrialists’ behalf certainly limited organization success when compared to other Southern Cone immigration centers, but so too did São Paulo’s distinctive nuclear family–centered immigration and workers’ unwillingness to strike. Newspaper accounts reveal rank-and-file divisions, and Hospedaria records explain the phenomenon by demonstrating the large number of nuclear families arriving and living in the city. For those immigrants and Paulistanos with minimal social connections and opportunities, family goals and survival trumped labor organization and camaraderie. These divisions existed across gender and national lines, but evidence suggests that Portuguese and Afro-Brazilians were more likely to be non-striking workers than other groups.

Conclusion

The Old Republic could have been a turning point in Brazilian development, but two important factors stunted that potential. The Hospedaria provided a cheap labor supply by bringing in working families, proving a disincentive to industrialist innovation. World War I cut short standards-of-living advancements and exacerbated working-class divisions. By the end of the Old Republic, access to the middle class was open to some, but closed to most, especially Afro-Brazilian women. These conclusions encourage scholars to revisit World War I’s impact in Latin America; to investigate how state institutions impact development; to consider working-class divisions when analysing Getulio Vargas–era labor reforms; and to include family agency in analyses of the modern era.

Making an Immigrant City

This chapter demystifies how São Paulo’s population expanded from around 65,000 inhabitants in 1890 to roughly one million by 1930. It demonstrates São Paulo distinguished itself as a node of family immigration among immigrant receiving nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigrant registrations from the Hospedaria de Imigrantes and calls to immigrate, chamadas, demystify how the state’s immigration program built to support coffee agriculture dramatically impacted the city's growth and allow for distinctions between immigrant groups. There were complex and diverse migration streams to the city. Early Italian migration was followed by unskilled, Portuguese migration between 1903 and 1913, and a skilled German migration in the postwar period. This change signals that World War I marked a turning point in the city from labor-intensive toward capital-intensive growth. The records also suggest the war marked an increase in northeastern migration to São Paulo. In contrast to most regional assumptions, migrants from northeastern Brazil were more literate than many immigrant groups and Brazilians from other regions. Despite their literacy, they were much less likely to be contracted in the city than their European counterparts.

The City of Opportunity?

This chapter explores working-class residents’ daily lives, standards of living, and challenges in São Paulo between 1891 and 1918. Examining this understudied period underscores the dramatic changes World War I wrought in the city. Wartime shortages disrupted the natural ebb and flow of migration, job opportunities, and urbanization, making a difficult reality more challenging for much of the city’s working class. Some scholars have argued that the war incentivized textile production and encouraged growth, but evidence from immigrant letters and prices demonstrates increased costs for low-quality textiles. The war also cut short job opportunities and educational advancements, saw a slowdown in most standard-of-living measures, and institutionalized the family wage and informality. While city officials founded weekly food markets to assist with rising food costs, these efforts were insufficient. By 1917, the situation had deteriorated enough to provide the necessary conditions for workers, both women and men, to mobilize a general strike.

The Textile Response

This chapter explores the textile industry’s response to wartime shortages, postwar overstocks, and sectoral crises in the mid-1920s. In the prewar era, industrialists became accustomed to government intervention and continuous labor supply. The war fundamentally changed the Paulistano labor composition and the state’s relative protection of the textile sector, but industrialists continued to manipulate labor costs by employing children and women. Budget constraints often prevented the implementation of new machinery, but in contrast to other sectors that adopted rationalization, training, and innovation, textile industrialists lobbied for extreme protection, actively dismissed labor laws, and were at the forefront of labor repression. The Centro dos Industriais de Fiação e Tecelagem de São Paulo formed after the 1917 General Strike demonstrates this preference for repressive labor tactics that included blacklists and even disappearing problematic workers. A case study of the Jafet textile factory highlights how these choices negatively impacted workers’ lives. Jafet increasingly employed women for shorter tenures, awarded minimal wage increases to combat the rising cost of living, and relied on blacklists and police intervention. As the company failed to provide schools, training, childcare, and adequate housing, these choices disproportionately impacted women and intensified labor inequities.

Introduction

In an era of commodity export–led growth, coffee served as the engine behind the city of São Paulo’s phenomenal expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city had incredible ethnic, racial, and national diversity for the hemisphere, and São Paulo became an important Transatlantic and Southern Cone immigration node for families. To fully appreciate this diversity, São Paulo’s population cannot be reduced into black/white or immigrant/Brazilian binaries. This is not to suggest that discrimination did not exist. On the contrary, the introduction concludes by challenging economic historians to delve more deeply into lived experiences and into understanding the role of persistent prejudice and discrimination in persistent Latin American inequality and underdevelopment. Similarly, it urges cultural and social historians to consider how using New Economic History methodologies to examine working-class lives can provide insight into archival silences and help to recover embedded narratives.

Discrimination in the Paulistano Labor Market

This chapter evaluates the degree of gender, racial, and national discrimination facing Paulistanos using firm-level employment records and complementary education and job evidence. By distinguishing between national groups, standard linear regressions and logit analyses demonstrate three groups faced substantial formal labor market discrimination, albeit to differing degrees and through different mechanisms. Portuguese workers were disproportionately hired into unskilled positions, Afro-Brazilians faced substantial hiring discrimination, and women faced both hiring and wage discrimination. Employers expected Portuguese workers to be unskilled and women to leave the labor market upon marriage, but Afro-Brazilians faced substantial prejudice. Hiring discrimination was consistent across the textile, commercial, railroad, and the urban transportation sectors. Prior to the war, periods of rapid growth and scarce labor supply could lessen racial prejudice and help explain the language of hope drawing Afro-Brazilians to São Paulo, but the postwar period brought a substantial contraction, making Afro-Brazilian women the most consistently excluded. Lifetime consequences of labor market discrimination were substantial, but the period saw minimal organization in opposition. One probable hypothesis explaining why more substantial mobilization did not occur was the class wage discrepancies that paled gendered, racial, and national differences.