Rescued from wineries in the South must be settled in BA – 05/03/2023 – Market

Workers rescued from a case analogous to slavery in wineries in Rio Grande do Sul, in February, must be settled on goat farms in the interior of Bahia.

The “Vida Post Resgate” project, by the MPT (Ministério Público do Trabalho) in partnership with the UFBA (Federal University of Bahia), began last month looking for land in the cities of Serrinha, Conceição do Coité, Monte Santo and São Domingos , in the Sisaleira region of Bahia (in the northeast of the state, about 200 km from Salvador).

The settlement is in the initial phase, and is the third of the MPT and UFBA project started in 2021. Before, one was conducted in Una, in the cocoa region, and another in Aracatu, in the southwest of the state.

The plan is to reinsert the rescued people and their families in field work, in organic crops without the use of pesticides and organized in the form of associations. The income will come from the production of milk and the sale of meat.

The project is funded with resources from compensation for collective moral damages from lawsuits filed against companies caught with work analogous to slavery.

The forecast is that just under half of the 194 Bahians who returned to the state after the episode in the South will be settled on farms.

A total of 207 workers were found in a work situation considered degrading in a Fênix company accommodation, in Bento Gonçalves, in the mountains of Rio Grande do Sul. The company provided services to Aurora, Garibaldi and Salton wineries.

The search for workers for the project was carried out considering the 27 cities where they live in Bahia. The four chosen locations are where most rescued people are concentrated — most of them experienced in goat farming.

The process is more advanced in the cities of Monte Santo and Conceição do Coité, where city halls have agreed to cooperate and are already working on the project.

The MPT is still awaiting the signing of a cooperation agreement with the Government of Bahia, which has already signaled interest. In March, the agency signed a technical cooperation agreement with the Government of Rio Grande do Sul.

Despite the enthusiasm with the workers’ reintegration project, the execution is slow.

“The anxiety is huge for it to work. Meanwhile, the bills don’t wait to be paid. If it weren’t for a project with allowance, nobody [dos trabalhadores] was”, says the national coordinator for the Eradication of Slave Labor of the MPT, Lys Sobral Cardoso.

In Bahia, rescued people are being monitored by Cras (Social Assistance Reference Center) and by Creas (Specialized Social Assistance Reference Center).

Social assistance is responsible for issuing documents for rescued workers. Some were without ID. “The documents were retained at the farm and, out of fear, some left them there”, says the coordinator of post-rescue actions at the State Department of Justice, Admar Júnior.

During registration at the centers, 77% of the men who returned to the state declared themselves black.

Workers were enrolled in the Cadúnico, which allows priority in rent assistance and in Minha Casa, Minha Vida. They received the first part of the compensation from the wineries and got unemployment insurance.

Project research has shown, however, that people remain in precarious jobs after being rescued from slavery-like work.

“Even people qualified for the formal market were not absorbed and, when looking for companies to prioritize the rescued, nothing changed: short time of employability and low salary, in the precarious way of before”, says the attorney Lys Sobral.

Among the Bahians who were found in the wineries, only seven managed to return to the job market with a formal contract so far.

According to Admar Júnior, Bahia recorded 248 rescues of workers in situations similar to slavery this year, inside and outside the state. The number is the highest in the last three years.

Throughout Brazil, 918 people were found in degrading working conditions between January and March, a record number in the first quarter of the last 15 years.

Sought after, the wineries say they are taking measures to avoid new episodes like the one in February.

In a note, Aurora stated that it will no longer outsource labor during the harvest period. Salton reinforced that it implemented stricter criteria in the process of selecting and contracting suppliers. Garibaldi, on the other hand, said that it seeks improvement in the selection of service providers.