BRAZILIAN REFINERIES GET HIGH MARKS ON PEOPLE MANAGEM'T

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“Valor Economico”, the Brazilian equivalent of the “Wall Street Journal”, has ranked the Virgolino de Oliveira Group and Guarani Sugar as two of the best Brazilian companies in human resources management. This is good news for the sugar and ethanol business in Brazil, which has a dire record in worker treatment.

As management practices improve – a trend clearly seen in Sao Paulo state, the country's most-developed area – the days of the “boia-frias” (picture below) seem to be a thing of the past. The term designates sugar cane-cutters and has become an expression which Brazilians associate with extremely low wages and harsh work conditions. It means, literally, “cold chow”.

The expression comes from the food (typically, rice, beans, cassava, and, on good days, a piece of meat or an egg) that workers packed into tin cans at home in the early morning hours before heading off to work. By lunchtime, their food was cold; out in the field, where they had to meet quotas of several tons of sugar cane cut every week, they had no means of heating their meal – hence, “cold chow”.