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LABOUR-BRAZIL: Night-time Brings Relief for Street Vendors

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 13 2005 (IPS) - At night on the streets of downtown Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Alberto is finally able to let down his guard when he spreads his toys on a piece of canvas alongside dozens of other street vendors hawking their goods on a 200-metre stretch of sidewalk.

In the evening there is no risk that their merchandise will be confiscated by the police. But in the daytime, inspectors can suddenly appear at any time when they are selling their wares in a nearby plaza. "It’s a constant threat," says Carlos Alberto.

Four years ago he joined the millions of Brazilians occupying space on the sidewalks and plazas to sell their merchandise, in contravention of municipal statutes and tax laws.

This huge army of street vendors, known as "camelós", began to balloon in Brazil in the 1980s, the "lost decade" in Latin America created by the debt crisis.

Street hawkers are the most visible expression of precarious labour in the cities. They are frequently involved in pitched battles with the police and municipal authorities who try to keep them from expanding into new areas.

In order not to lose his toys – battery-operated planes, helicopters and colourful bumblebees that light up and move around – Carlos Alberto sets out only a few in the daytime.

That way he can quickly gather them up in a large bag and run if needed – a tactic that has prevented him from losing any of his goods so far, a fate he has seen others suffer.

"My dream is not to continue living like this, but to save up enough money to have a legal business, set myself up in a small shop and work in calm, without having to flee from the police, and with Sundays off," he tells IPS.

"But I have a family – a wife and a nine-year-old son," he adds, explaining that he earns "between 70 and 120 reals a day" (30 to 51 dollars). Before getting involved in street vending, he had a stable job in a grocery store that paid him less than one-third of what he now earns.

At the age of 35, Carlos Alberto – who only went to school through the fourth grade – considers himself successful in this business. He works around 12 hours a day Monday through Saturday and slightly less than that on Sundays, with no social security coverage or labour rights. "God is my security," he says.

Carlos Alberto believes his success is due to a few basic rules that he sticks to. For example, he always offers new, attractive products, sells only battery-operated toys with motion, and keeps two of them switched on, sitting on boxes on the ground. Most of the merchandise he sells comes from Paraguay, a major source of contraband goods for the enormous Brazilian market.

But the big attraction are his prices, he underlines, noting that similar toys in the stores cost at least two times the prices he offers.

His suppliers are the so-called "sacoleiros" – "bag carriers" – who make regular trips to Ciudad del Este just across the border in Paraguay, in the tri-border region where that country converges with Argentina and Brazil.

These small-scale contraband merchants work under the constant threat of being caught by the tax and customs authorities.

Pedro (a pseudonym) brings contraband merchandise to the city of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the eastern state of Minas Gerais. He travels every week to Ciudad del Este in a bus that carries sacoleiros to and from the border in a trip that takes more than 40 hours.

This illegal commerce has been his source of income since he lost his job in a bank 14 years ago, during a period of mass layoffs in the banking industry.

At that time, the number of bank employees, who totalled over 800,000 in 1990 in Brazil, was cut by half virtually overnight. For many of them, the informal labour market provided an alternative source of livelihood.

"Now I earn more money and can afford the cost of good schools for my three kids, up through the university," says Pedro, who on each visit to the Paraguayan border city buys around 5,000 dollars worth of merchandise.

Once he and the other sacoleiros on the bus had their purchases seized by the police. On that occasion, he lost some 8,000 dollars in goods.

Brazilian tourists are only allowed to bring 300 dollars worth of products legally from Paraguay.

But "shopping tourism" is better organised now than in the early 1990s. Hundreds of buses now set off from different parts of Brazil to Ciudad del Este in convoys scheduled to reach the Paraguayan border on Wednesday evening, in order to make inspection more difficult, said Pedro.

After buying and selling a wide range of goods, from trinkets and toys to TV sets, he finally began to specialise in computer parts. His group of sacoleiros has a rule that none of the members can include cigarettes among their purchases because anti-smuggling laws are more strictly and systematically enforced in the case of tobacco.

In fact, the clampdown on cigarettes smuggled in from Paraguay has basically eliminated contraband tobacco from street vendor stalls in Río de Janeiro, laments Maria Brito, a public employee who smokes more than two packs a day and says "I used to buy them from the ‘camelós’ for half the price."

The "sacoleiros" not only supply street vendors but also provide part of the merchandise sold in shops in Brazil’s cities and larger towns, such as the capital, Brasilia, where low-cost goods can be found at the "Paraguayan Fair".

Shopping tourism declined in the wake of the January 1999 devaluation of the Brazilian real. But thousands of Brazilian buses still bring visitors to the tri-border region every week.

Although informal sector workers have no labour rights or social security coverage, this segment of the economy provides a means of survival for millions of unemployed Brazilians.

Labour Ministry statistics show that just over 30 million people in this country of 182 million work in the formal economy – only one-third of the economically active population.

The rest are informal sector workers who are self-employed or work for others without a legal contract or labour benefits, like nearly all of the country’s domestic employees.

To reach the level of development that Greece has achieved, Brazil would have to generate 50.4 million new formal sector jobs by 2020, according to a study coordinated by Marcio Pochmann, a labour economist at the University of Campinas.

But to reach the level of Japan, 56.4 million new jobs would be needed – nearly double the current total.