Salo V. Coslovsky

Flying Under the Radar? The State and the Enforcement of Labour Laws in Brazil

Over the past three decades, developing countries have deregulated, privatized and liberalized their economies. Paradoxically, they have also retained or even strengthened their labour laws and regulations. This compromise has created enormous political tension, which manifests itself as recurrent calls for either a rollback or a deepening of reforms. Few of these calls have been heeded, so the burden of reconciling the conflicting policies ends up being transferred to those public agents who enforce the regulations on the ground. To understand how these agents act, the latitude they have, the limits they face and the results they accomplish, this paper examines how labour inspectors and prosecutors intervened in four beleaguered industries in Brazil. It finds that enforcement agents often do more than just impose fines or teach infringers about the law. Rather, they use their discretion and legal powers to realign incentives, reshape interests and redistribute the risks, costs and benefits of compliance across a tailor-made assemblage of public, private and non-profit enterprises in a way that makes compliance easier for all involved. On a broader canvas, regulatory enforcement agents who perform this role can be characterized as the foot soldiers of a post-neoliberal or neo-developmental state.

Parallel Paths to Enforcement: Private Compliance, Public Regulation, and Labor Standards in the Brazilian Sugar Sector

In recent years, global corporations and national governments have been enacting a growing number of codes of conduct and public regulations to combat dangerous and degrading work conditions in global supply chains. At the receiving end of this activity, local producers must contend with multiple regulatory regimes, but it is unclear how these regimes interact and what results, if any, they produce. This article examines this dynamic in the sugar sector in Brazil. It finds that although private and public agents rarely communicate, let alone coordinate with one another, they nevertheless reinforce each other’s actions. Public regulators use their legal powers to outlaw extreme forms of outsourcing. Private auditors use the trust they command as company insiders to instigate a process of workplace transformation that facilitates compliance. Together, their parallel actions block the low road and guide targeted firms to a higher road in which improved labor standards are not only possible but even desirable.

The Pragmatic Politics of Regulatory Enforcement

This paper describes regulatory enforcement as an intrinsically political endeavor. We argue that through daily enforcement transactions, regulators and the regulated reshape their interests and the environment in which they operate, reconstructing their perceptions of and preferences for compliance. We call this phenomenon the “sub-politics of regulatory enforcement”. After reviewing the trajectory of the field of regulatory enforcement as well as recent research on inspectors and street-level regulatory agents, we argue for a conception of politics that differs from the idea that predominates in the regulatory enforcement literature. Contrary to those who see enforcement styles and strategies as independent variables determining compliance, we posit that enforcement agencies and regulated entities engage in an indeterminate exploration of their institutional surroundings to create legal, technological, and managerial artifacts to address practical problems of doing business and complying with law. These agents move beyond imposing fines, issuing warnings, or educating their subjects. Rather, the daily routine of front-line enforcers around the world is best described as a political terrain, in which they are constantly building and revising agreements (with the regulated) that realign interests, reshape conflicts and reapportion risks, costs and benefits among various agents so as to make compliance tolerable, sometimes even advantageous to all involved.

Beyond Bureaucracy: How Prosecutors and Public Defenders Enforce Urban Planning Laws in São Paulo, Brazil

Cities need law to thrive, but it is not clear how abstract texts become tangible policy outcomes. Existing research on the role of law in urban affairs conceives law as either an algorithm that shapes urban life or a reflection of political disputes. The former assumes that the meaning of law is obvious; the latter claims it is irrelevant. In contrast to these views, I argue that laws are multipurpose instruments that acquire a specific function when enforced by those government agents who operate at the frontlines of public service. To understand what these agents do and why, I conducted a qualitative study of the Ministerio Publico and the Defensoria Publica in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Through this process, I found that these government agencies are not cohesive bureaucracies but heterarchies composed of distinct internal factions with different evaluative principles. Moreover, officials within them are not isolated from other entities in society but tightly entangled with them, and these connections influence what these officials do. Finally, enforcement agents are not always resigned to solving conflicts as they arise. Rather, they strive to find acceptable solutions in the interstices of existing conditions or even change the circumstances that created the conflict in the first place.

Enforcing Food Quality and Safety Standards in Brazil: The Case of COBRACANA

In numerous product lines, globalization of production has been accompanied by increasingly austere product quality and safety regulations. These regulations are particularly stringent in the food and beverage sectors and put enormous strain on producers from developing nations. This article examines a cooperative of sugarcane, sugar, and ethanol producers from Brazil that, when confronted with the challenge of new regulations, adopted three policies that encouraged its members to upgrade quality and safety standards, enabling them to compete successfully in a demanding business environment. I argue that the co-op’s success was due to (1) a new cost accounting methodology that monetized some of the differences in product quality, attenuating tensions among members; (2) a low-cost, high-powered system of regulatory incentives that empowered middle managers vis-à-vis top executives within regulated firms; and (3) external auditors who acted not as police officers or consultants but as conduits, reestablishing information flows and helping to create a business atmosphere conducive to productive change.

Increased hospitalizations for decompensated heart failure and acute myocardial infarction during mild winters: A seven-year experience in the public health system of the largest city in Latin America

Background In high-income temperate countries, the number of hospitalizations for heart failure (HF) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) increases during the winter. This finding has not been fully investigated in low- and middle-income countries with tropical and subtropical climates. We investigated the seasonality of hospitalizations for HF and AMI in Sao Paulo (Brazil), the largest city in Latin America. Methods This was a retrospective study using data for 76,474 hospitalizations for HF and 54,561 hospitalizations for AMI obtained from public hospitals, from January 2008 to April 2015. The average number of hospitalizations for HF and AMI per month during winter was compared to each of the other seasons. The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was used to test the association between temperature and hospitalization rates. Findings The highest average number of hospital admissions for HF and AMI per month occurred during winter, with an increase of up to 30% for HF and 16% for AMI when compared to summer, the season with lowest figures for both diseases (respectively, HF: 996 vs. 767 per month, p<0.001; and AMI: 678 vs. 586 per month, p<0.001). Monthly average temperatures were moderately lower during winter than other seasons and they were not associated with hospitalizations for HF and AMI. Interpretation The winter season was associated with a greater number of hospitalizations for both HF and AMI. This increase was not associated with seasonal oscillations in temperature, which were modest. Our study suggests that the prevention of cardiovascular disease decompensation should be emphasized during winter even in low to middle-income countries with tropical and subtropical climates.

The Resolution of Land-Use Conflicts in Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a densely populated, globally connected urban center whose rapid growth has been associated with an increasing number of land-use conflicts. In this paper, I use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the legal processes through which these conflicts are resolved. While mainstream analysts conceive of the law as a technology, public litigation organizations as cohesive bureaucracies, and the state apparatus as separate from society, I find that the law acquires a specific meaning only when enforced by those officials who operate at the front lines of public service. Crucially, their professional behavior is not formulaic. This is so because law-enforcement organizations are not bureaucracies but rather heterarchies with distinctive network properties. Moreover, the borders between the state and society are so porous that, at times, it is difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins, and this web of mutual connections influences officials’ behavior.