Sob a gestão paternalista: relações de classe e condições de vida no caso da Company Town de Minas do Camaquã em Caçapava do Sul/rs

Abstract

Paternalism involves ties of proximity, benefactors, help or help that develop between subjects in unequal positions. In the case of large companies, many of them establish the workforce close to the workspace, building villas and housing complexes that in the technical literature are conventionally called the company town model. Minas do Camaquã, in the interior of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, is a good example, since for years both the complex of villages and the copper mining were managed by the Brazilian Copper Company (CBC), having constituted a space for links welfare workers in the midst of an intensely hierarchical model of settlement. That said, this case study tried to investigate and understand, through documentary research and interviews, to what extent the forms that assumed the class relations that developed in the Camaquã Mines between 1942 and 1996 are the result of the paternalistic management of the company town, capable of containing work conflicts even in contexts of intense hierarchies and inequalities. The objective is also to explore the marks left by the paternalistic management of the CBC, both in space and in the perceptions of the residents of Minas do Camaquã. From the reported experiences, it was possible to identify, from the second phase of the CBC, the influence of a “paternalistic circuit” based on dependence, guaranteed by concessions and deferences that, together with other elements of cohesion and control, contained class conflicts until the creation of the Company's workers' union.