I give warm thanks to the participants in the 2011 Toronto Brazilian History Workshop, my colleagues Elena Conis, Julia Bullock, and AnaPatricia Garcia, and the two ILWCH reviewers for thoughtful and constructive feedback.

1. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos (a pseudonym), interviews with the author, tape recordings, Vicência, Pernambuco, March 21 and March 27, 2003.

2. Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998), 22–25 Google Scholar.

3. Kula, Witold, Measures and Men, trans. Szreter, R. (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Antonil, André João, Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (São Paulo 1923 [1711]), 109Google Scholar.

5. Varzea, Affonso, Geografía de Açúcar, no Leste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1943), 261–63Google Scholar.

6. Maior, Armando Souto, Quebra-quilos: lutas sociais no outono do império (São Paulo, 1978), 16, 92–169 Google Scholar.

7. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Mineola, NY, 2003)Google Scholar. Kula, Measures, 24–28.

8. Mazoyer, Marcel and Roudart, Laurence, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, trans. Membrez, James H. (New York 2006), 338–46; 352Google Scholar.

9. Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 78Google Scholar.

10. Mintz, Sidney, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New Haven, CT, 1960), 136Google Scholar.

11. Palmeira, Moacir, “The Aftermath of Peasant Mobilization: Rural Conflicts in the Brazilian Northeast since 1964,” in The Structure of Brazilian Development, ed. Aguiar, Neuma (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), 82Google Scholar. The vara, in fact, is so linguistically imbedded as a form of measurement (though fairly recently according to the Dicionário Houaiss) that in addition to meaning rod, staff, cane, or pole, actually can be used to mean simply a system of measurement. Instituto Antônio Houaiss, Dicionário Houaiss (Rio de Janeiro, 2001)Google Scholar, 2829.

12. Junqueira, Antônio Augusto B. and Dantas, Bento. “A cana-de-açúcar no Brasil,” in Cultura e adubação de cana-de-açúcar, ed. Malavolta, E. et al. (São Paulo, 1964), 38Google Scholar.

13. Júnior, Manuel Diégues, População e Açúcar no Nordeste do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1954), 128Google Scholar. Diégues Júnior also noted that the conta was known in some areas of the Northeast as the “ticuca.” Sigaud, “A Percepção do Salário entre Trabalhadores Rurais no Nordeste do Brasil,” in Actes du XLII^e Congrès International des Américanistes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1976), 321Google Scholar.

14. Severino José da Silva, interview with the author, tape recording, Vicência, April 1, 2004.

15. In his study of mill workers, José Sérgio Leite Lopes also heard plenty of testimony from rural workers about the manipulation of task size and remuneration. Lopes, Leite, O vapor do Diabo: o trabalho dos operários do açúcar (Rio de Janeiro, 1976), 165Google Scholar.

16. Sigaud, Lygia, “The Idealization of the Past in a Plantation Area: The Northeast of Brazil,” in Ideology and Social Change in Latin America, vol. I: Emergence of Worker Consciousness, eds. Nash, June and Corradi, Juan (New York, 1975), 181Google Scholar. Sigaud, “A Percepção do Salário,” 318–20.

17. Jaffe, James A., The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge, 1991), 1Google Scholar.

18. Wright, Gavin, “Slavery and American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History 77 (2003): 531Google Scholar. Wright refers to “individual task systems approximating piecework” on New World plantations.

19. Price, Richard, Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour, 1830–914 (Cambridge, 1980), 37–38 Google Scholar.

20. de Melo, Mário Lacerda, “Problemas agrícolas e industriais do açúcar em Pernambuco,” Brasil Açucareiro 28 (1946): 51Google Scholar.

21. Holt, Thomas C., The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 41Google Scholar, 126.

22. Telmo Frederico do Rêgo Maciel, Nível de Vida do Trabalhador Rural da Zona da Mata—1961 (Recife: IJNPS, 1964), 36–38, 50Google Scholar; FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico dos trabalhadores rurais (Recife: FETAPE, CONTAG, SORPE, 1968), 47Google Scholar.

23. Pedro Eugênio Toledo Cabral, “O processo de proletarianização do trabalhador canaiviero de Pernambuco,” Revista Pernambucana de Desenvolvimento 11 (1984/1986): 170–71Google Scholar. The erosion of tenantry and the shifting norms for access to land and houses on plantations has been well documented and studied. For a specific example of workers resisting a new charge for housing in 1954, see September 14, 1954, report from the Delegacia de Polícia do Município de Amarají to Coronel Secretario da Segurança Pública, in SSP 793: Indústria Luis Dubeux S/A (Usina União e Indústria e Refinaria Bomfim), Arquivo Público do Estado de Pernambuco (hereafter APE).

24. Alexandre Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, Problemas econômicos e sociais da lavoura canavieira, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1943)Google Scholar. Bastos, Elide Rugai, As Ligas Camponesas (Petrópolis, 1984), 58Google Scholar.

25. British historian James Jaffe suggests that unions often emerged to challenge the implementation of piece rate payment systems. Jaffe, Market Power, introduction.

26. Soares, José Arlindo, A frente do Recife e o governo do Arraes: Nacionalismo em crise—1955/1964 (Rio de Janeiro, 1982)Google Scholar.

27. French, John D., The Brazilian Workers' ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), 35–36 Google Scholar. Welch, Cliff, The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil's Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964 (University Park, PA 1999), 297–300 Google Scholar.

28. “Usineiros e Trabalhadores Debatem Uniformização de Tarefas no Campo,” Diário de Pernambuco, June 29–30, 1963, 3.

29. It is overwhelmingly likely that the count was actually measured in braças. But as noted above, “count” traditionally was used as a synonym for “measure,” of whatever sort.

30. “Polícia de Catende ausentou-se, mas camponeses ordeiros frustraram as agitações em ‘Roçadinho’,” Diário de Pernambuco, July 12 1963, 3.

31. A collection of David Montgomery's insightful analyses of these issues in early twentieth-century US is Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar. Especially relevant are Chapters 1–3.

32. Holt, Problem of Freedom, 148.

33. Cook, Scott, Peasant Capitalist Industry: Piecework and Enterprise in Southern Mexican Brickyards (Lanham, MD, 1984), 126Google Scholar. The worker did frankly acknowledge that piece rates encouraged competition with other workers.

34. Bezerra, Gregório, Memórias, segunda parte: 1946–1969 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1980), 178Google Scholar. Manuel Correia de Andradae, Área do sistema canavieiro, SUDENE Estudos Regionais No 18 (Recife: SUDENE/PSU/SRE, 1988), 224.

35. The Diário printed the final agreement, which is in a secret police clipping file on the rural union federation: “Proposta Conjunta das Tabelas das Tarefas do Campo,” in Documentos de Segurança Social e Política (hereafter SSP) 28688: Federação dos Trabalhadores Rurais de Pernambuco, APE.

36. “Proposta conjunta…” in SSP 28688: Federação de Trabalhadores Rurais de Pernambuco, APE.

37. Welch, The Seed Was Planted, 215.

38. Welch, The Seed Was Planted, 215. Maybury-Lewis, Biorn, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers' Trade Union Movement, 1964–1985 (Philadelphia, PA, 1994), 39Google Scholar.

39. Bezerra, Memórias, 178.

40. da Silva, Fernando Teixeira, “Valentia e cultura do trabalho na estiva de Santos,” in Culturas de classe: Identidade e diversidade na formação do operariado, eds. Batalha, Claudio H. M., da Silva, Fernando Teixeira, and Fortes, Alexandre (Campinas, 2004), 208, 234Google Scholar. Another example of struggle over this principle comes from nineteenth-century British masons who battled employers' attempts at labor regulation, arguing that the struggle boiled down to whether “we are to be treated like beasts of burdens or … as moral and intellectual beings.” Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 37–38.

41. Thompson, “Time,” 85.

42. I cite Thompson without wishing to imply that England's industrial revolution established a model for the trajectory of labor relations elsewhere in the world. I find the observation compelling because it so aptly describes the case in Pernambuco, but I recognize that the location- and context-specific paths to these points differed. Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly critiques Thompson for declaring that capitalism will inevitably bring time-discipline to the developing world. Of course, capitalism operates within history and does not create its own inexorable temporality. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 48Google Scholar.

43. For my description of the elite vision of the plantation landscape, see Rogers, Thomas D., “Laboring Landscapes: The Environmental, Racial, and Class Worldview of the Brazilian Northeast's Sugar Elite, 1880s–1930s,” Luso-Brazilian Review 46 (2009): 22–53 Google Scholar.

44. “Proposta Conjunta das Tabelas das Tarefas do Campo,” op cit.

45. Ronivaldo Nascimento, interview with the author, tape recording, Engenho Humaitá, Palmares, January 25, 2003.

46. March 7, 1966, letter from Agápito Francisco Santos to Delegado Regional do Trabalho, in SSP 1606: Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço da Mata, APE.

47. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos and Severino José da Silva, interviews, op cit.

48. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11–25.

49. In a dialogue with Scott's ideas, Michael Ervin argues that subject populations actually desire some of the products that come from these Scottian tools of quantification and measurement. In the specific case of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, he describes the double-edged quality of statistics and maps, which could both help and constrain popular groups. Ervin, Michael A., “Statistics, Maps, and Legibility: Negotiating Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” The Americas 66 (2009): 156Google Scholar.

50. The nineteenth-century British masons Richard Price studied also sought arrangements with employers that would limit their work. Their solutions ranged from “relatively simple statements of hours and wages to complex and detailed exegeses which minutely regulated the conditions under which the work was to be done.” In all cases, the agreements included restrictions on piecework. Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 90.

51. Rottenberg, Simon, “Negotiated Wage Payments in British West Indian Agriculture,” Journal of Farm Economics 33 (1951): 403Google Scholar.

52. See Montgomery, Workers' Control in America.

53. Scott notes the frailty of simplifying instruments in the face of reality's complexity. Even as authoritarian states rely on them, he writes, they undermine those states' projects by failing to account for the messiness of social and environmental dynamism. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 77, 80, 82, 89, 95, 262.

54. “Paro Totalmente Atividade dos Trabalhadores da Cana,” Diário de Pernambuco, November 20 1963, 3. Bezerra, Memórias, 175–179. Page, Joseph A., The Revolution that Never Was: Northeast Brazil, 1955–1964 (New York, 1972), 166–69Google Scholar.

55. The New York Times contributed to the mood with articles bearing headlines like “Northeast Brazil Poverty Breeds Threat of a Revolt” and “Marxists Are Organizing Peasants in Brazil.” Tad Szulc, “Northeast Brazil Poverty Breeds Threat of a Revolt,” New York Times, October 31, 1960; Szulc, “Marxists Are Organizing Peasants in Brazil,” New York Times, November 1, 1960.

56. “Porque os Trabalhadores Rurais não Acreditam em Tabelas,” flyer dated October 28, 1968, in SSP 1352: CONTAG, APE.

57. Correia de Andrade, Área do Sistema Canavieiro, 390–391. Dantas, Bento and Lúcio dos Santos e Silva, Subsídios para o programa de desenvolvimento sustentável da zona da mata (Recife, 1995), 72Google Scholar. de Andrade, Manuel Correia, Modernização e pobreza: a expansão da agronindústria canavieira e seu impacto ecológico e social (São Paulo, 1994), 42, 173Google Scholar.

58. Scott argues that the operative temporality of high modernist regimes is the future, so planning becomes a scientific process endowed with great prestige and importance. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 95–96.

59. “Contrato Coletivo de Trabalho, na Lavoura Canavieira de Pernambuco,” in SSP 28688: Federação dos Trabalhadores Rurais de Pernambuco, APE.

60. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 19. Many scholars agree that after a period of harsh repression, the military government deliberately allowed the union movement to operate. See versions of this argument in Pereira, Anthony, The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1997)Google Scholar; Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible; and Houtzager, Peter, “State and Unions in the Transformation of the Brazilian Countryside, 1964–1979,” Latin American Research Review 33 (1998): 106–108 Google Scholar.

61. Koury, Mauro Guilherme Pinheiro, “Movimentos sociais no campo (estudos),” Texto de Debate 9 (1986): 19–46 Google Scholar; “DRT Considera Ilegal Greve do Cabo e Adverte que Decretará Intervenção,” Diário da Noite, September 17, 1968. The Cabo union might have felt safe organizing a strike because of its relationship to Father Melo, a priest involved in the rural labor movement who had cultivated a relationship with the military regime.

62. Quoted in French, John, Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 175Google Scholar.

63. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 87.

64. The Northeast's market share was dropping even as the federal government was pursuing a “Plan for the Expansion of the National Sugar Industry.” Correia de Andrade, Modernização e pobreza, 173. Dantas, Bento, A agroindústria canavieira de Pernambuco: as raízes históricas dos seus problemas, sua situação atual e suas perspectivas (Recife, 1971), 36–38 Google Scholar. Dantas and Silva, Subsídios para o Programa de Desenvolvimento, 17.

65. “Recomendações para a política açucareira do Nordeste,” Brasil Açucareiro 65 (1965): 12–13 Google Scholar. “Comissão para o Trabalho,” Brasil Açucareiro 66 (1965): 14Google Scholar.

66. Union President Agápito Francisco Santos letter to Regional Labor Commissioner, March 7 1966, in SSP 1606: Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço da Mata, APE.

67. “Exmo. Sr. Ministro do Trabalho e da Previdência Social,” November 4, 1966, in SSP 31,496: Federação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura de Pernambuco (VI), APE.

68. “Porque os Trabalhadores Rurais não Acreditam em Tabelas,” op. cit. Letter from Rural Workers Union of Rio Formoso, September 10, 1968, in SSP 1634: Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais de Rio Formoso, APE.

69. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 44.

70. Letter to Polícia Federal from rural union of São Lourenço da Mata, November 26, 1969, in SSP 1606: Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais de São Lourenço da Mata, APE.

71. November 26, 1969, letter from São Lourenço da Mata union to Departamento de Polícia Federal, in SSP 1606, op cit.

72. Sigaud, Lygia, Os Clandestinos e os Direitos: Estudo sobre Trabalhadores da Cana-de-Açucar de Pernambuco (São Paulo, 1979), 90, 97Google Scholar.

73. Junta de Conciliação e Julgamento (hereafter JCJ), Palmares 1965–1966, Arquivo do Tribunal Regional do Trabalho (hereafter A-TRT).

74. See Termo de Reclamação 86/63, JCJ Nazaré da Mata, A-TRT for an example of contractor-planter agreements, as spelled out in court testimony.

75. “Relatório No 01/76, Recife, 9 fevereiro de 1976,” in SSP 31,496: FETAPE VII, APE. FETAPE president Almeida do Nascimento only gave numbers for the country as a whole. At that scale, temporary workers outnumber contracted workers by 6,800,000 to 1,200,000.

76. Kalleberg, Arne L., “Nonstandard Employment Relations: Part-Time, Temporary and Contract Work,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 341–65Google Scholar.

77. Humphrey, John, Capitalist Control and Workers' Struggle in the Brazilian Auto Industry (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 87Google Scholar.

78. I have called attention to the importance of this case's implications elsewhere: Rogers, Deepest Wounds, 169–170; Rogers, Thomas D. and Dabat, Christine, “‘A Peculiarity of Labor in this Region’: Workers' Voices in the Labor Court Archive at the Federal University of Pernambuco,” Latin American Research Review 47, special issue (2012): 163–78Google Scholar. While it offers a particularly clear example of the Table's application, my colleague Dabat and I have researched similar cases in Nazaré da Mata and other municipalities, and in our article we note a good deal of other scholarship using the cases.

79. March 17, 1977, hearing in Processo 49/77: Severina Rosa da Conceição e outras (4) vs. Engenho Boa Vista (BA), JCJ-Nazaré da Mata, A-TRT.

80. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 19.

81. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos, interview.

82. FETAPE, Levantamento sócio-econômico, 58.

83. “Exmo. Sr. Ministro do Trabalho e da Previdência Social.”

84. July 13 Judgment in TRT Processo 567/77, A-TRT.

85. July 13 Judgment in TRT Processo 567/77, A-TRT.

86. April 26, 1977, hearing, in TRT Processo 567/77.

87. Thomas D. Rogers, “Making Class Consciousness under a Repressive State: Rural Unions in 1970s Brazil.” Paper for “Class Analysis and the Politics of the People: Investigations in a Post-Colonial Mode,” conference at Emory University, November 22–23, 2013.

88. Irací, interview with the author, tape recording, Vicência, March 7 and March 27. Irací was secretary of the rural union of Vicência, an elected position.

89. Gerson Quirino Bastos, interview with the author, handwritten notes, Recife, March 25, 2003.

90. Koury, Movimentos sociais, 21.

91. This is an argument of Biorn Maybury-Lewis captured in his book title, The Politics of the Possible.

92. Joaquim Manuel dos Santos, interview with the author, tape recording, Murupé, March 27, 2003.