Two people left their jobs on Friday. Let us compare and contrast.
Maria, our now former nanny, has become a recent feature on this blog thanks to suspicions swirling around the violent robbery but also because of my forced intimacy with her in my role as house husband.
Maria was better than the first nanny, but that's not saying much. She was a grandmother, while her predecessor was younger and without children. Sadly, both seemed to come with typical Brazilian nanny qualifications, ie a bit of very narrow life experience. They were unable or unwilling to learn and adapt and seemed stubborn as mules in doing things their way, or as they put it, the Brazilian way.
Ignorance isn't about how much you don't know; it's about how much you don't want to know.
I, as a fairly house-proud modern metrosexual, was able to contribute, I imagine, considerably more to the domestic duties than they were used to receiving - including nappy changing and other baby-centred chores. Yet this didn't seem to earn me much credit when it came to Maria carrying out our modest baby feeding instructions and other "suggestions". As P keeps telling me, theirs is a mentality which seems to want to take advantage of you if you don't take advantage of them. At it's worst it is a potent mix of low cunning and laziness.
When Maria said she had to leave early one Friday because her aunt had died I said ok, even though it left me some tough babysitting duties and without any instructions from her before leaving. When leaving early again the following Friday, she tried to tell me she had been working longer than normal. I referred to her previous premature departure and she told me it was "the law" in Brazil that an employer must release you early if a family member dies. Sounds very dubious to me. Likewise, when she arrived many hours late the following Monday because of a "bus strike", we were still expected to reimburse the £30 she apparently had to pay her cousin for a lift.
There were various other examples of me handing over a bit of cash here and there and not being scrupulous in asking for it back. And of course we reimbursed her the 200 reais which she said had been stolen in the raid. Who will reimburse us our lost money ? Certainly not my useless travel insurance policy.
Yet when it came to the final payday, having rejected my proposal of simple weekly payments - she of course preferred an irregular timetable and variably sized payments - Maria tried every which way to pull the wool over my eyes. Because innumeracy is so widespread in Brazil, I was never quite sure whether she genuinely couldn't add up or simply wanted to confuse me into submission. P is convinced it's the latter.
Example: we had negotiated an all-inclusive fee, ie travel and food payments both contained within the weekly amount. I pointed this out multiple times to Maria as we tried to agree her final payment figure, and she kept agreeing that they were indeed included. Yet, insanely, she would then continue to insist that we had to add on 115 reais "for food". I felt like Basil Fawlty wrestling with Manuel.
Maria had her plus points as a nanny; Sam seemed to like her well enough and I also managed to have a few laughs with her. Our unexpected camaraderie as joint victims of a violent robbery inevitably brought us closer, so I don't want to be completely negative.
But in the end what I found exasperating and depressing, once again, is this oh-so-Brazilian insularity; this dumb complacency and belief that foreigners are there to be milked rather than, god forbid, to actually learn something from. For this mentality we can, once again, thank Brazil's stagnant social order.
The other person who left her job on Friday was P. She had finally managed to get a position at a leading investment bank which, however, involved a nightmare commute on Sao Paulo's inadequate tube and bus network. On a two-month probation period, she was earning roughly three times Maria's salary. But then Maria's was tax-free since it was all in cash.
P's was a high-stress job with an endless to-do list of travel arrangements and other diary-organising engagements for busy-bee bankers. The same kind of work in London was infinitely pleasanter and more efficient. And here in Sao Paulo the work itself was made that bit harder by office sniping and gossip about the English-speaking, formerly London-residing new recruit. In short, the usual Brazilian insecurity that results from an economy based more on nepotism and hierarchy than meritocracy. As with Maria, some of P's colleagues were threatened by what they didn't know, rather than being intrigued or stimulated by what they might learn.
When the buses weren't running and P had to take an expensive taxi home once or twice, this came out of her own pocket, not her employer's. And when the violent robbery threw us all into confusion and caused P, perhaps over-hastily, to hand in her notice (which she was subsequently unable to withdraw) the remuneration for her one-month of labour was reduced significantly because of a "contractual penalty" for leaving early. So much for her employer's compassion.
Comparing and contrasting these two types of employees and employers speaks volumes about the brutal, shoddy nature of Brazil's workplace. Seeing what you can get away with, on the one hand, and being threatened by "foreign" ideas and experience, on the other, is a mindset which hasn't and won't get this country very far.
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