Underemployed.

Brazil doesn’t offer its citizens any unemployment protection. The absence of unemployment benefit means everyone needs to work. This is why you’ll often see middle-aged and older people working as waiters and shelf-stackers, and seeming to take a degree of pride and enjoyment from their work which is conspicuously absent in the UK. However, there are some unintended consequences of this policy.  

Gone are the sulking teenagers from your coffee shop, gone is the self-checkout from your supermarket. In their place stands a mass of eager and subservient functionaries ready to do every kind of work imaginable so that you don’t have to raise a finger, unless it’s to point at what you want. If you choose, there’s someone to do quite literally everything for you, and often there are several of them. Two people come round to put up your shelf. Three people are involved in watering a lawn. Four people will put up a sign (one up the ladder and three watching, offering advice and passing tools).  I once saw a whole crew of guys doing some street-sweeping, with one guy obviously the overseer. Remember, this is street-sweeping: not so much to oversee. Consider it. ‘So, what have you got there? Looks like a leaf?’ ‘Yup, leaf.’ ‘Well, sweep it up, will you?’ ‘Yes, boss.’

In a domestic setting, it all gets a bit Lives of the Eminent Victorians. It’s quite common for a wealthy family of four to have a maid, a cleaner, a couple of security guards, a cook and gardeners. The family has the money, the poorer members of society need some of it. An understanding is reached. This imperative to find work permeates every level of society; there’s none of the industrialisation and automation we associate with mass production. Take bread. In the UK a bog-standard loaf of bread is always sealed by those strips of clear sticky tape, clearly administered by some clever little machine. Here in Brazil they’re sealed with wire pipe cleaners. So, instead of a machine doing each loaf of bread, they’re done by hand, each one, in some factory somewhere.

Perhaps best of all was the time my wife and I went to get some passport photos done. We took ourselves off to a shopping centre and found a booth. It looked exactly like a standard coin-op booth, except a bit bigger. My wife went inside and was just adjusting her chair, when a hand snaked in from behind the screen and adjusted the overhead lighting slightly. My wife emitted a polite scream appropriate to the situation, and a little old lady’s face peeked round the corner to ask if she was alright. That was her job: to squash herself in behind the screen and wait for people to come along and get their picture taken. It’s not a vocation, I imagine, but it is a job.