Hard-working Brazilians

Professional relations in multi-cultural environments result in a complicated matter. I have known this for quite a long time having had lots of cultural clashes throughout my professional career. But there is one recurrent subject when talking to people from many different countries: how hard-working each country’s people are?

Right underneath this question lays a cultural aspect much more complex than it appears at glance. First, the concept of “hard-working” has a huge weight of cultural meaning. I am sure that, if simply questioned about the meaning of “hard-working”, people from different cultures will respond with a gigantic array of meanings.

Hypothetically speaking, an American for instance, might understand “hard-work” as “working towards making our Great Nation strengthen and expand our economical, political and military reach over the world”. At the opposite corner, a fundamentalist from a Muslim movement might understand “hard-work” as “working hard for making our beliefs shown to the World even if I have to become a martyr”.

I am not questioning the two opposite views here or whether one is right over the other. My point is that “hard-work” does not mean the same thing in every cultural environment.

That said; let’s move to the second point: if the “hard-working” concept per se is not easily shared among people, is it worth comparing working behaviors among different cultures? I think not.

I have come across lots of misunderstandings regarding this subject now that I am working mainly in Finland. It is common for Finns to read our Brazilian behavior towards work as a relaxed and unreliable one. It is understood that we have no worries, no stress and that we rarely get a job properly done - mainly when it comes to having it done within a certain level of quality at a certain time and under a certain cost.

This view surprised me at first. It really did. I had this mind-image of hard-working immigrants that went to Brazil from all over the world in search for a better life, striving to build a new home-country from absolute nothing. Or that view of slaves that were forcibly taken from Africa and who creatively invented even a [now-famous] fighting system to rebel against their oppressors.

I remembered all those simple people that I met. People with very little education but with a huge cultural baggage of love, friendship and openness that worked too hard, even harder than they should (or even humanly could) - mainly after traveling more than 2 hours just to get to their jobs usually departing from very ugly and badly preserved parts of the town where they actually live and raise their kids.

There were also those hundreds of executives and office-workers in general, either working from 08AM to 10PM or having two shifts by working 9 or even 10 hours every day and then attending night school to get some academic background. They are culturally forced to dress with a complete business-suit on those very hot days frequently having their possessions pick-pocketed or just been flash-kidnapped. All this just so that they are able to run and expand the biggest and most profitable multinationals located in foreign land on Earth.

Culturally speaking, I call this hard-work.

But this is not how we, Brazilians, sell the idea to other cultures. We continuously sell carnival, sensuality and unreliability as our main “brands”. Comparing culturally-heavy concepts is ineffective but marketing positive aspects would be a nice way of building a better self-image abroad.