Social-environmental responsibility: State, market and work in the sucroalcooleiro sector of the ribeirão preto/SP region

Currently, Brazil is characterized as one of the largest producers of sugar and alcohol in the world. The 2008/2009 crop production reached 572.64 million tons of sugarcane. The sector in the region of Ribeirão Preto / SP, has the most developed forms of technology and organization of production, and is a center of national ethanol production. The restructuring process initiated in the 1990s has brought to rural workers precarious working conditions, with high rates of productivity, combined with unemployment of workers. We emphasize the intensive mechanization of cane cutting, and from the year 2000, changes in ways of organizing production, caused by debates about environmental crisis, the search for alternative energy sources and sustainable development. In this sense, the sector is to incorporate environmental responsibility programs as a way to reintegrate workers in manual harvesting of sugar cane, unemployed by mechanization. The practice of Social-environmental responsibility is present in the business environment in general, and also is arising in the alcohol sector. Discussed in a perspective quite endogenous, especially the areas of administration and business management, we aim to enter the practice of environmental responsibility in its wider context, placing them in a process that has legitimized the possibility of a "social economy" and strengthening the idea "solidarity", based on the division of responsibilities between government, third sector and market. This perspective of analysis is necessary since the emergence of such practices goes along with changes in contemporary relations between capital and labor and the consequent reorientation of trade union practices and strategies. We observed the appropriation of the discourse of environmental responsibility on the part of unions and investigate if such means of action constitutes a viable alternative to the massive unemployment of workers cutting cane.