Os cantos dessa cidade: a proteção do trabalho de ambulantes no carnaval de Salvador a partir do monopólio de produtos e serviços

Abstract

Municipal revenues from the Salvador Carnival have risen from 5 million in 2012 to 30 million in 2013 with a sponsorship model that institutes "Exclusivity Zones". In this model, the sale of products and services is restricted to the sponsor's brand in the festival circuit. To guarantee monopoly sales, the City Hall demarcates the party's perimeter with inspection gates and creates a task force to inspect the work undertaken by street vendors. In this scenario, the present study started from the legal and historical frameworks that made the formation of this model of financing the party possible to suggest legal alternatives that prioritize the protection of decent work instead of economic exploitation perceived through the monopoly. The research investigates the historical and legal formation of Carnival and Salvador's Carnival; the historical and legal formation of its financing models; the creation of the street labor market in the city of Salvador and its protagonists; the economic exploitation perceived by the City Hall and the centrality of the monopoly for this increment. This paper argues in favor of: the need to expand the protection given by Article 7 of the Federal Constitution to the entire category of workers, which are not protected by the employment relationship; the accountability of the bidding company based on the economic benefit it perceives; matching the category of street commerce with independent workers; the existence of a similar model of control that goes back to a colonial-mercantilist imperial-slave framework of 1857 and the centrality of street commerce in the construction of wealth in Salvador. It concludes with the existence of a model of wealth production that was only possible from the permanence of this unprotected work. In the end, it argues the impossibility of comparing two different historical moments (1857 and 2013-2019), crossed by a constitutional framework, and obtaining the same result: the maintenance of the exploitation of a precarious working condition.