Poultry farming as a plantation system: confinement and forced labor

Abstract

The article brings reflections on labor relations and the specific type of poultry confinement based on data collected in a rural community in Ubiratã-PR. Taking poultry farming as a plantation system, the author followed the routine of a family of employees and residents and could see how, despite being independent contractors, their degrees of freedom are very limited. In addition to transforming the pace of the cycle of plants, animals and people, with a set of techniques and technologies that accelerate the growth of chickens, making farmers need to adapt to the accelerated pace, the dependence of the plantation on some kind of forced labor, in Donna Haraway's terms, became evident. The workers' lives are reoriented around the schedules and needs of the confined animals, all to keep them alive until the end of the batch. A combination of work in large-scale production and small-scale subsistence farming around the house under strict sanitary conditions is perceived, in addition to an intensification of the domination of the sphere of work over the domestic sphere, mainly in monitoring the temperature conditions during the heating period and at night.