Vdoc - Pub - Labour Mobilization Politics and Globalization in Brazil
Vdoc - Pub - Labour Mobilization Politics and Globalization in Brazil
Vdoc - Pub - Labour Mobilization Politics and Globalization in Brazil
Marieke Riethof
Studies of the Americas
Series Editor
Maxine Molyneux
Institute of the Americas
University College London
London, UK
The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specific, cross-
disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin America,
the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of Politics, Economics,
History, Anthropology, Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Gender,
Social Policy and the Environment. The series publishes monographs,
readers on specific themes and also welcomes proposals for edited
collections, that allow exploration of a topic from several different
disciplinary angles. This series is published in conjunction with University
College London’s Institute of the Americas under the editorship of
Professor Maxine Molyneux.
Labour Mobilization,
Politics and
Globalization in Brazil
Between Militancy and Moderation
Marieke Riethof
Modern Languages and Cultures/
Latin American Studies
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside, UK
I began the project that would eventually result in this book, with a research
trip to Chile. As a typically ambitious graduate student I hoped to develop
a comparison between the political role of trade unions in Chile and Brazil.
While in Santiago I had arranged interviews with several trade unionists to
scope out the potential for this project. As I arrived at the union headquar-
ters, however, I discovered that angry miners had occupied the building,
while internal union elections revealed significant splits and disagreements.
As the Chilean unions entered a major political crisis, I decided to switch
my main focus to Brazil, a country still known internationally at the time
for its strong and combative union movement. I discovered soon enough
during my fieldwork that the crucial role of trade unionists in the Brazilian
transition to democracy was only part of the story and that these unions
faced their own political challenges. Nevertheless, my initial experience in
Chile and my many conversations with labour activists in Brazil showed me
that it is moments of crisis and conflict that reveal significant insights into
how and why trade union political strategies evolve.
I was also fascinated when the trade unionists I interviewed connected
their workplace struggles to a wider political agenda, which they considered
a natural extension of their union work. They explained to me that they did
not find these two levels of political activism always easy to reconcile but
that political ideas and aspirations always informed what they did. Their
political activism ranged from opposition to the dictatorship and protests,
to participation in political parties, social movements, and even in govern-
ment, yet I found that the literature on trade unions and labour studies paid
relatively little attention to the political nature of collective labour action.
vii
viii PREFACE
the Centre for Brazilian Studies in Oxford. In recent years, working with
fellow Latin Americanists in an interdisciplinary environment at the
University of Liverpool has enriched my understanding of the region in a
way that would have been difficult otherwise.
I am very grateful to my family for their support and generosity during
all these years. A special mention to my nieces, Eline and Laura, and my
nephew Jack, who always manage to take my mind far away from academic
work. Sadly, my mother, Renée Riethof-Zanoni, saw the beginning but
not the end of this project but I know she would have been very proud of
me. I dedicate this book to our son, Oskar O’Sullivan-Riethof; he could
not stay with us, but he will always be in our hearts. Finally, my husband,
Tadgh O’Sullivan, lived through the many highs and lows of the research
and writing process, across borders and sometimes even across continents.
Not only this book, but also my life would not have been the same with-
out his love and support.
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Militancy, Moderation, and Political Strategies: Explaining
the Political Dimensions of Labour Militancy 4
1.2 Turbulent Political Trajectories: Understanding Cycles
of Militancy and Moderation 7
1.3 Approaching Brazilian Labour: Contexts and Outline 10
Bibliography 16
xi
xii Contents
Index 235
Abbreviations
xv
xvi ABBREVIATIONS
xix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Footage from early 1979 shows Lula pacing on a stage nervously, sweating
in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette.1 He was about to address 150,000
metalworkers who were on strike for fair wages while protesting against
the impact of the military regime on ordinary Brazilians. There were too
many people to fit in the metalworkers’ union assembly hall, so the meet-
ing had to be moved to the football stadium Vila Euclides in São Bernardo
do Campo, Greater São Paulo. Tensions were rising as the police were
readying themselves to intervene violently, while the union leadership had
been forcibly removed from their posts with their civil and political rights
annulled. In his speech Lula emphasized that the unions were exercising
their legal right to strike and that they were not “radical”. Meanwhile, and
under the direct threat of repression, Lula and his fellow strike leaders
tried to convince the strikers to accept a truce between the unions and the
employers. After a turbulent meeting, the union assembly suspended the
strike on May 1, 1979.
Back in São Bernardo, twenty-three years later and just months after he
was inaugurated as Brazil’s first working-class president in 2003, Lula
spoke to an audience of trade unionists about the strike: “It was the most
difficult meeting of my life; every time we tried to talk about an a greement,
the workers booed. And I managed to convince my comrades to accept
the agreement but they returned to the factories feeling that I had betrayed
them. A feeling that a strike should go on to the bitter end. It was the
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Fig. 1.1 Public and private sector strikes in Brazil, 1984–2013. (Departamento
Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Socioeconômicos (DIEESE). “Balanço das
greves em 2013.” Estudos e Pesquisas 79, December 2015)
INTRODUCTION 7
empirical material from the 1980s and 1990s. Adopting this longer-term
perspective on the evolution of labour strategies, this book explains not
only under what conditions trade union strategies change but also their
impact on Brazilian politics.
The Brazilian new unionist movement became one of the paradigmatic
cases of trade unions that bucked the global trend of labour decline given
that workers managed to successfully challenge the authoritarian regime
and effectively promote labour rights. However, Brazilian unions have also
faced major challenges in the various political and economic contexts
examined in this book. Consequently, this book explains the dynamic evo-
lution of labour political strategies using insights from labour and social
movement theories, emphasizing that arguments about a linear trajectory
from militancy to moderation fail to capture the cyclical and conflictive
nature of these same strategies, which should instead be understood as
being in a dialectical relationship. A teleological analysis in which all roads
lead to decline risks underemphasizing the conflicts created by the chang-
ing context and shifting strategies, while also obscuring episodes of
renewed militancy. Rejecting a narrow economic explanation of labour
militancy and moderation—that organized labour inevitably declines in
response to economic downturns and the pressures of globalization—this
book shows that the rapidly changing political contexts, particularly dur-
ing periods of heightened political change, sparked labour militancy, even
in adverse economic conditions. In the Brazilian context, labour militancy
in the late 1970s and early 1980s arose in response to the repression and
political restrictions imposed on trade unions by the military dictatorship.
Paradoxically, opportunities for political participation in the democratiza-
tion process also raised questions about how the unions could maintain
their radical agenda while participating in political and electoral processes.
This dilemma could not be resolved without some degree of moderation.
Analyses focused on the decline of the once powerful Brazilian union
movement do not tell the full story of this dynamic; a gap which this book
addresses through its focus not only on moderation but also on the resur-
gence of militant strategies, using an analytical framework that engages
with internal and contextual factors to explain labour’s political strategies.
Another contribution of this book is that its Latin American and
Brazilian political analysis focuses on the responses of trade unions to
political change. In a Latin American context, as the cycle of new left gov-
ernments has come to a close in the second half of the 2010s, the book
offers significant insights into the rise and fall of progressive governments,
INTRODUCTION 9
including the relationship with the latter’s civil society supporters. While
Brazil under Lula and Dilma is now generally considered as “mildly
reformist”19 compared to the more radical left in other countries in the
region, the relationship between the PT and its supporters as well as the
implications for their political agendas and strategies reflect similar dilem-
mas faced elsewhere. By focusing primarily on moderation, political analy-
ses of this period have often lost sight of the waxing and waning of labour
militancy, which rarely follows a linear trajectory. Instead, the explanation
here focuses on why each period in Brazil’s recent political history has
witnessed the seesawing of social and political mobilization in response to
changing economic and political contexts. The Brazilian case therefore
functions as a microcosm of many of the political problems faced by the
entire spectrum of the Latin American left, particularly in terms of how
activists react when their political agenda is translated into their party
allies’ electoral victory. The case of Brazilian trade unions illustrates that
when the left is in government, party supporters such as trade unionists
have faced a number of strategic dilemmas when attempting to manage
internal debates, often involving calls for a radical agenda, alongside the
opportunity to influence or even participate in government. Progressive
governments have faced another set of political pressures, including having
to manage coalitions and their appeal to broad segments of the electorate
while maintaining social movement support. Understanding the waves
and legacies of militancy and moderation as well as the nature of union-
party relations helps to explain how unions and social movements respond
when progressive governments distance themselves from their own roots.
In sum, the evolution of labour political strategies and agendas is an
inherently conflictive and complex process, shaped by trade unions’ internal
and external contexts. Reflecting this complexity, this book examines why
such dynamics have sometimes constrained labour action, leading to prag-
matism and moderation, while at other times they resulted in militant strat-
egies and agendas. The analytical focus here concentrates on the interplay
of strategies, ideas, and context, which includes the wider economic, social,
and political circumstances in which trade unions and working people oper-
ate. Because of unions’ complex political landscape, the union movement’s
trajectory cannot be reduced to a single factor, such as a specific institu-
tional framework or, indeed, internal and external political dynamics. In
light of this, this book examines how the Brazilian union movement pulled
in two directions: one challenging the status quo, and the other concentrat-
ing on political participation. The resulting tensions and strains are key
elements in the modern Latin American labour movement’s story.
10 M. RIETHOF
between labour political strategies and their respective contexts. All of these
were relevant throughout the recent history of the union movement, which
indicates that even the 1980s—known as the height of labour militancy—
saw examples of negotiation and internal conflict, presaging future dilem-
mas. Similarly, while the years since Lula’s election have often been seen as
dominated by co-optation and pragmatism, this period also experienced
significant levels of protest and challenges to the PT-led governments. In
this discussion, negotiation refers to strategies focusing on government
policies and agreements with employers. Protests refer not only to strike
activity—just one indicator of trade union strength and power20—but also
to other forms of contestation such as demonstrations, marches, sit-ins,
work stoppages, and occupations. Following this book’s argument that
the conflicts and dilemmas generated by the left in power challenges
assumptions about the Brazilian left as being overwhelmingly co-opted by
the government, each chapter discusses debates about political strategies
with reference to dynamics internal and external to organized labour.
Conflict can arise from dilemmas about whether to negotiate, participate,
or protest, leading to either militant or moderate strategies.
The second chapter discusses the theoretical question as to why there
are variations in militancy and moderation in unions and how we can
explain changes in political trajectories over time. This question is par-
ticularly salient with the PT’s coming to power, which was also the ulti-
mate objective of many participants in Brazilian unions; however, this led
to significant political dilemmas about autonomy and cooperation. The
theoretical framework is based on labour and social movement theories,
beginning with a discussion concerning the inherently political nature of
trade union strategies, including the significance of state-labour relations
in developing countries such as Brazil. The debate on sources of labour
power moves away from structural explanations of union behaviour by
introducing the notion that collective labour action emerges in response
to trade unionists’ perceptions of their unions’ strengths and weaknesses.
Although social movement theories have often disregarded labour and
trade unions in favour of identity-based movements, they provide signifi-
cant insights into cycles of protests and the evolution of movement tra-
jectories with reference to the political context and internal developments.
Thereby, the chapter ends with a discussion about militancy and modera-
tion as a framework to understand why trade union strategies change in
response to given political and economic contexts.
12 M. RIETHOF
Turning to the 2000s, the relationship between trade unions and the
PT in national government appeared to be based on participation, accom-
modation, and even co-optation. Chapter 6 analyses the involvement of
union representatives in key reform proposals—such as labour, social secu-
rity, and minimum-wage reform—which ended up being so controversial
that they resulted in splits within both the union movement and the PT. In
fact, protests against government policies, particularly the lack of progress
compared to the PT’s original agenda, also surfaced in the early days of
Lula’s presidency. The mass protests that took place between 2013 and
2016 focused popular anger on government spending priorities and cor-
ruption, receiving significant international attention, particularly in the
context of similar protests taking place elsewhere in the world. However,
these protests did not emerge out of a political vacuum and we can find
examples of renewed labour militancy and conflicts throughout the Lula
and Dilma years, particularly post-2009. Culminating in Dilma Rousseff’s
impeachment in August 2016, this period marked significant social and
political polarization, in which labour militancy and moderation played a
key but largely underappreciated role.
Notes
1. As featured in the documentary ABC da Greve (The ABC of Strike),
directed by Leon Hirszman (1990).
2. The source for both quotes is a transcript of Lula’s speech in Folha de Sao
Paulo, “Leia íntegra do discurso de Lula em São Bernardo do Campo,”
Folha de São Paulo, May 1, 2003, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/
brasil/ult96u48592.shtml
3. Apart from the authors quoted in here, see also Hernan B. Gómez, Lula,
the Workers’ Party and the Governability Dilemma in Brazil (New York:
Routledge, 2013); Wendy Hunter, The Transformation of the Workers’
Party in Brazil, 1989–2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010); André Singer, Os sentidos do lulismo: Reforma gradual e pacto con-
servador (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012).
4. Antunes also argues that Lula abandoned his traditional union and social
movement support base, relying primarily on mobilizing the recipients of
Bolsa Família social benefits. Ricardo Antunes, “Trade Unions, Social
Conflict, and the Political Left in Present-Day Brazil: Between Breach and
Compromise,” in The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire, ed.
Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2013), 270. For other variations of the argument that the PT’s electoral
support base shifted away from the union movement to the poor, see Cesar
Zucco, “The President’s ‘New’ Constituency: Lula and the Pragmatic Vote
INTRODUCTION 15
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e a mudança. In Sociedade política no Brasil pós-64, ed. Bernardo Sorj and Maria
H. Tavares de Almeida, 279–312. São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Antunes, Ricardo. 2013. Trade Unions, Social Conflict, and the Political Left in
Present-Day Brazil: Between Breach and Compromise. In The New Latin
American Left: Cracks in the Empire, ed. Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr,
255–276. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2005. Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory
Democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
INTRODUCTION 17
Bohn, Simone R. 2011. Social Policy and Vote in Brazil: Bolsa Família and the
Shifts in Lula’s Electoral Base. Latin American Research Review 46 (1): 54–79.
Clua-Losada, Mònica, and Laura Horn. 2014. Analysing Labour and the Crisis:
Challenges, Responses and New Avenues. Global Labour Journal 5 (2):
102–113.
D’Araujo, Maria C. 2009. A elite dirigente do governo Lula. Rio de Janeiro: FGV/
CPDOC.
DIEESE. 2015. Balanço das greves em 2013. Estudos e Pesquisas 79, December.
Folha de Sao Paulo. 2003. Leia íntegra do Discurso de Lula em São Bernardo do
Campo. Folha de São Paulo, May 1. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/
brasil/ult96u48592.shtml
Franzosi, Roberto. 1995. The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar
Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
French, John D., and Alexandre Fortes. 2012. Nurturing Hope, Deepening
Democracy, and Combating Inequalities in Brazil: Lula, the Workers’ Party,
and Dilma Rousseff’s 2010 Election as President. Labor 9 (1): 7–28.
Galvão, Andréia. 2009. A reconfiguração do movimento sindical no governo Lula.
Revista Outubre 18: 177–200.
Gómez, Hernan B. 2013. Lula, the Workers’ Party and the Governability Dilemma
in Brazil. New York: Routledge.
Hall, Michael M. 2009. The Labor Policies of the Lula Government. In Brazil
Under Lula: Economy, Politics, and Society Under the Worker-President, ed.
Joseph L. Love and Werner Baer, 151–165. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochstetler, Kathryn. 2008. Organized Civil Society in Lula’s Brazil. In Democratic
Brazil Revisited, ed. Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power, 33–53.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Hunter, Wendy. 2010. The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil,
1989–2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hunter, Wendy, and Timothy J. Power. 2007. Rewarding Lula: Executive Power,
Social Policy, and the Brazilian Elections of 2006. Latin American Politics and
Society 49 (1): 1–30.
Kelly, John. 1998. Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and
Long Waves. London: Routledge.
Noronha, Eduardo. 1990. A explosão das greves na década de 80. In O sindical-
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e Terra.
Oliveira, Francisco de. 2006. Lula in the Labyrinth. New Left Review 42: 5–22.
Radermacher, Reiner, and Waldeli Melleiro. 2007. Mudanças no cenário sindical
brasileiro sob o governo de Lula. Nueva Sociedad 211: 1–24.
Samuels, David. 2004. From Socialism to Social Democracy: Party Organization
and the Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil. Comparative Political
Studies 37 (9): 999–1024.
18 M. RIETHOF
understanding of how trade unions have fared, this chapter argues for a
move away from narratives about decline and focuses instead on the dilem-
mas created by globalization, political change, and economic reforms. In
particular, this chapter underlines the fundamentally political nature of the
challenges facing trade unions, which requires an examination of how
political dynamics shape trade union strategies.
Brazilian trade unions appeared to experience a different dynamic in
the debate on globalization and labour, as trade unions based in the mod-
ern sectors of the economy and in multinational corporations played a key
role in Brazil’s democratization process and its aftermath. However,
despite their significant political role, the union movement has also faced
challenges associated with economic crisis and neoliberal reforms, pushing
militant union activists towards defensive strategies. In the context of the
increasing importance of progressive politics in Latin America since 1998,
Brazilian trade unions have encountered new dilemmas after the left
gained power, particularly regarding how to maintain a critical and auton-
omous stance towards its party ally while making full use of novel oppor-
tunities to influence the policy process. These dilemmas have often
manifested themselves in debates about whether trade unionists should
pursue militant or moderate strategies, providing significant insights into
the union movement’s response to political and economic change. In the
Brazilian case, three dilemmas emerged from the democratization process:
firstly, regarding the extent trade unionists needed to turn their opposition
to military rule into a political agenda; secondly, how to address the impact
of neoliberalism on labour and trade unions; and thirdly, what the effect
would be on the union movement of a left-wing government.
To understand these dilemmas and their implications for labour politics
in Brazil, the chapter begins with the argument that we should understand
union strategies as inherently political, particularly if we consider orga-
nized labour’s key role at various points in Latin America’s political history.
The discussion then turns to labour’s opportunities to exert political influ-
ence, focusing on sources of labour power which unions have used to
mobilize workers while also pressurizing employers and the state. A key
element of this discussion is the notion of political power, including the
ability to exert political influence both outside of and within the political
arena. Because the interaction between these constraints and the union
activists’ response is not static, we need to take into consideration that the
dynamics of political contention helps to explain the trajectories of union
action, including how their strategies have evolved over time in interaction
LABOUR MOVEMENTS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE DILEMMAS… 21
with the political and economic context as well as the influence of inherited
strategies, ideas, and agendas. Using insights from the dialogue between
labour and social movement theory, the argument proposed here is that
debates about strategies do not represent a fixed or pre-set choice, rather
they reflect the internal and external dynamics in which unions operate.
Based on these insights, the chapter concludes by offering definitions of
militancy and moderation, arguing that they are in fact relative terms
whose meaning can change over time; therefore, they need to be under-
stood with reference to the context in which these strategic and political
debates have taken place.
existing political and economic order. For example, the political exclusion
of trade unions and other parts of civil society in authoritarian Brazil politi-
cized their members and actions, strengthening their role in the democra-
tization process. Labour activism also has political implications because
workers’ demands can put democratic governments under pressure, par-
ticularly when striking employees implicitly or explicitly challenge govern-
ment policy. Trade unions not only aim to increase wages but also focus on
other factors that affect working conditions, welfare, and employment,
such as social and macroeconomic policy.5 Strikes can turn into a political
problem if they disrupt public life, which trade unionists can use as leverage
in negotiations with politicians to achieve their demands, as in the case of
anti-privatization, public transport, or health sector strikes. To explain the
reasons why labour activists and their unions have become politically
involved, this section discusses why we should understand labour collective
action as inherently political.
Many labour scholars recognize the political character of trade unions
and labour movements in terms of the way wages and working conditions
are shaped in the political arena, which makes trade union involvement in
politics a logical next step. Trade union activists have also pursued political
strategies because they are alert to the importance of influencing political
decision-makers and the political nature of labour market institutions. For
example, Seidman points out in her study of Brazilian and South African
trade unions that it is difficult to disentangle their political and economic
demands because “without access to state resources, without reforms in
labor legislation and state policies, workers could not hope to improve
either their working conditions or their general standard of living”.6
Similarly, according to Scherrer and Hachmann, the labour market does
not operate exclusively in economic terms but is embedded in social and
political structures so “[a] labour movement is bound to become involved
in politics, because so many aspects of its own conditions of action, as well
as of its members’ lives are shaped by the prevailing laws and balance of
forces in the political arena”.7 Furthermore, Candland and Sil emphasize
the union movement’s position as a major group in civil society, whose
concerns and agendas transcend narrow demands: “workers and their for-
mal and informal organizations represent an important collection of actors
who are simultaneously political actors.”8 Although these studies recog-
nize the political nature of union activism, how unions and labour activists
turn this understanding into a political agenda and how this political
engagement affects trade union strategies needs further discussion.
24 M. RIETHOF
demonstrations often have a political impact in the sense that they put
pressure on politicians, which is a manifestation of associational power in
terms of the way union leaders use trade union organizational structures to
organize people. The most common examples of workers’ associational
power are trade unions and their relationship with political parties20 but
this form of power can also manifest itself in networks and alliances with
other civil society organizations, such as social movements.21 The extent to
which workers can deploy their associational power should be understood
as shaped by national institutional and regulatory frameworks, as “histori-
cally, associational power has been embedded in state legal frameworks”.22
More specifically, in most of Latin America, institutions such as corporat-
ism have circumscribed trade union associational power by, for example,
banning trade unions from taking on political roles and limiting the geo-
graphical and sectoral scope of collective bargaining. These corporatist
restrictions reflected government intentions to limit unions’ associational
power and leverage in collective bargaining processes. Despite these restric-
tions, trade union structures continued to exist and often became vehicles
for pro-democracy mobilization in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrating how
workers were able to operate within the constraints that they faced.
In addition to the capacity to bargain and organize, recent labour
research has also engaged with symbolic, social or coalitional, and political
power, which are particularly significant in explanations of organized
labour’s political trajectories. In her book on marginalized workers in the
USA and South Korea, Jennifer Chun employs the concept of symbolic
power, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, in order to explain how struggles
over moral and cultural understandings of justice and recognition have
become important sites of contestation, not only for social movements but
also for labour activists. Her understanding of symbolic power goes to the
heart of the debate on segmented labour markets and increasingly precari-
ous working conditions. She argues that a significant area of labour poli-
tics is about the recognition of workers who are marginalized from formal
labour rights and trade union representation. Symbolic power therefore
centres on “the ability to win recognition in the public arena as a legiti-
mate political actor with the capacity to influence the distribution of power
and resources in society”.23 Another distinct aspect of moral and symbolic
power relevant to the examples analysed in this book is the legitimacy
gained by the pro-democracy movement in their opposition to authoritar-
ian politics,24 which refers to the struggle for the recognition of citizen-
ship, human and labour rights. Workers’ central role in the opposition
28 M. RIETHOF
also includes the disruptive effect of strike action in sectors such as public
transport and education. Trade union involvement in formal politics is
another key dimension of political power, providing labour activists with
institutional influence, power which is “defined through the system of
industrial relations, through mechanisms of participation in society, and
through the institutional integration of the labor unions in government
activities”.29 Indeed, Webster calls institutional power the missing link in
the debate on power sources, stressing that “institutions shape the rela-
tionship between structural and associational/organisational power”.30
While political influence through formal institutions—such as govern-
ments, political parties, and participatory structures—have constituted a
significant source of political power, this influence has also resulted in
dilemmas about the extent to which unions should engage with these
structures or challenge them. In addition, this predicament has proved to
be a recurring theme in Brazilian labour politics, underlining the impor-
tance of considering labour sources of power in terms of how trade union-
ists have perceived and used them in practice.
The extent to which labour actors can exert political influence through
political parties is another factor shaping militant and moderate strate-
gies.31 In a democratic context, the role of unions and labour-based parties
has often been interdependent, even if they play different political roles:
while trade unions can gain access to the state and decision-making
through political parties, political parties can strengthen their electoral
base through trade union support. Consequently, organized labour’s
influence in the political arena points to the significance of union-party
relations for union political strategies. As Lee argues with reference to
Taiwan and Korea, the extent to which unions were represented politically
by parties or had political channels to voice their concerns, particularly
through political parties, had a significant effect on labour militancy.32
While in Korea unions were largely excluded from political influence and
resorted to militant action, in Taiwan trade union moderation can be
explained as a result of its incorporation in the government through the
Kuomintang party. Lee’s argument underlines the moderating role of
close union-party relations, particularly when the party is in power, which
we can also observe in the relationship between the PT and its support
base in the unions.
Yet, conflicts have emerged due to the fact that these political parties
represent wider interests beyond their union constituency. The need to com-
promise with other parties and groups—whether for electoral purposes, in
30 M. RIETHOF
Distinctions between the party and its constituent social organizations are
deliberately blurred; indeed, the party may appear to be more of a move-
ment than an apparatus for electoral contestation, as it is directly engaged in
social struggles outside the sphere of institutional politics, and party mem-
bers and leaders are drawn directly from social movements rather than from
the ranks of a separate, professional political caste.37
Even in the early years of new unionism these relations were more conflic-
tual than suggested by Roberts’ description; however, they underline the
significant overlap between the PT and social movements in terms of their
membership, leaders, ideas, and agendas. PT-led municipal administrations
faced conflicts with unions concerning strike action in the public sector
while the MST increased land occupations in the immediate aftermath of
Lula’s inauguration. Amidst accusations that the PT administration would
shift the government too far to the left, “civil society organizations tried to
use their mobilizing power to support Lula and nudge him closer to their
shared historic agenda”.38 In her study of urban protest in Brazil and
Mexico, Bruhn argues that the reason why social and labour movements
initially stepped up their protests against their party ally in government was
that they expected the party to be more responsive to their demands.39
However, labour-based parties like the PT have also experienced difficul-
ties maintaining civil society support while appealing to the wider elector-
ate and managing (often fractious) relations with coalition partners. In his
study of the PT’s relationship with civil society, Gómez found that as a
result of these considerations, which he calls the “governability dilemma”,
both the party and its social movement allies became more moderate and
pragmatic after the transition to democracy, shifting the focus of their
political strategies from protests to the political arena.40 Gómez demon-
strates that the PT did not so much distance itself from its social movement
allies but offered activists rewards, such as financial resources, political
positions, and access to political decision-making, which often secured
their loyalty.41 These examples suggest that there is no straightforward
causal relationship between the nature of union-party relations and labour
militancy and even if parties and unions become more moderate, the seeds
of militancy remain, as moderate agendas were strongly contested.
The sources of labour power discussed in this section help explain how
and why trade unions engage in collective action, as the structural condi-
tions in which workers operate shape what they can and cannot achieve.
These different power resources are also linked to why trade unionists
32 M. RIETHOF
have used different strategies to achieve their aims based on what they
perceive their strengths to be. Collective action among a skilled work-
force in a key economic sector therefore displays a different dynamic than
the collective action of street cleaners who are not members of formal
trade unions and may need to rely on their ability to disrupt public life to
get their point across to the authorities. Given the heterogeneity of work-
ing people and their organizations in Latin America, it is hard to treat
these differential power resources as structural conditions that can be
objectively measured in an analysis of collective labour action. Union
membership, education and sectoral employment have sometimes been
used as a proxy for labour power, but this approach is problematic in the
diverse Brazilian context. Trade unions themselves are also internally
diverse; as Barker and Lavalette have observed, unions “include complex
networks and tendencies, which contend among themselves over the
identity of the movement itself, its strategies and policies”.42 Moving
beyond the most commonly cited sources of labour power—structural
and associational power—to address symbolic, social, and political power
means adding a subjective dimension to the debate, whereby the interac-
tion between structural and subjective factors shapes collective labour
action.43 As Silver suggests, the crisis of organized labour may have
resulted not so much from “transformations in the structural conditions
facing workers’ movements but [from] transformations in the discursive
environment”.44 Recognizing the subjective dimension of labour power
means treating sources of labour power as constructions that emerge
from debates about politics and strategies within trade unions, not as
objective conditions per se. This approach shifts the political analysis of
labour strategies towards trade unionists’ perceptions of their position in
society as well as viewing these same perceptions as shaped by their expe-
riences as a given worker and trade unionist, the legacies of past collective
action, and political ideas.
and unions were heavily repressed.59 Both actual and threatened repression
have therefore played a significant role in the evolution of labour politics
in Latin America, as also recognized in the literature on twentieth century
democratization discussed earlier in the chapter. Consequently, Almeida
argues that social movement analysis should place more emphasis on
threats, including repression and the constraining effects of economic cri-
sis, in order to understand how protests evolve in developing countries.60
These processes can trigger a protest wave, which Almeida defines as “peri-
ods of widespread protest activity across multiple collectivities that often
encompass a sizeable portion of the national territory”.61 Fragmented col-
lective grievances and instances of unrest do not automatically turn into a
wave of protests; rather they require networking and overlapping between
social movements, using their associational and coalitional power to maxi-
mize their “political, ideological and economic power sources”62 to spread
the protests beyond an initial sense of dissatisfaction. A key element of
these protest waves is the movements’ ability to translate disparate feelings
of dissatisfaction into a powerful focus to unite disparate protests. In recent
Brazilian history, protests developed into more widespread discontent at
various times, often with significant trade union participation: the rise of
grassroots and union opposition to the dictatorship from the early 1970s,
which turned into the mass strikes of the late 1970s; the mass demonstra-
tions for direct presidential elections in the mid-1980s; the anti-austerity
protests in the 1980s and 1990s; since 2009, the new cycle of labour
unrest and, from 2013 onwards, the anti-government protests leading to
the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. To understand Brazilian
unions’ significant role in these protests and the subsequent political
change, the next section brings together the discussions on the political
nature of trade union action, sources of labour power and protest waves,
alongside a discussion on the relationship between labour militancy and
moderation.
that they could mobilize workers to contest wages and working condi-
tions, which started to include demands for political change as the strike
movement grew in scope and impact.
Another insight is that union activists can radicalize as protests decline,
with activists reaching back to a more militant past to inform debates
about a new context. For example, the return to civilian rule in Brazil in
the mid-1980s meant that trade union leaders had to rethink their political
approach in the newly democratic context, while capitalizing on their
learned ability to rally large numbers of people. However, their mass
mobilization strategies were not always successful in the early years of the
democratic government, leading to internal debates about the extent to
which trade unionists should call for radical change. From this perspective,
the legacy of successful militancy could compensate internally for the “loss
of novelty” in protests; however, this same legacy has also had the capacity
to divide moderate and radical groups as they experience changing cir-
cumstances.95 In addition, the complicated legacy of successful militancy
was also evident in the debates of the 1990s and 2000s, when union docu-
ments often referred to strategic successes of the past, without being able
to replicate them in the new circumstances. However, in other cases, a
tapering off of mobilization together with public recognition of move-
ment demands can lead to activists pursuing participation in state institu-
tions, often requiring activists’ professionalization and a moderation of
their demands.96
Moreover, organizational aspects of trade unions such as their bureau-
cratic nature has created an ambiguity within the union movement, which
pushes labour activists towards both militancy and moderation, as Fantasia
and Stepan-Norris have argued:
2.6 Conclusion
The repressive and authoritarian context of the Brazilian dictatorship led
to a strong commitment among trade unionists to grassroots organizing
and internal democracy, which allowed union leaders to engage workers in
strike action. However, during the 1990s when new unionists continued
to pursue a broadly progressive agenda in the workplace and in the political
LABOUR MOVEMENTS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE DILEMMAS… 45
and neoliberalism that lasted from the 1970s until the mid-1990s. The
evolution of trade union political strategies has involved the translation of
workers’ demands and interests into a specific political agenda, a pro-
gramme which was then promoted through a range of conflictive and
contested strategies: these have ranged from workplace action with politi-
cal implications, pressure on the government through demonstrations and
mobilization, to lobbying and participation in government. This political
agenda has been fraught with contradictory interests and strategies, often
reflecting the way workers are embedded in socio-political and economic
contexts. By focusing on the conflicts which have emerged from trade
union responses to rapid political and economic change, we can analyse
labour political trajectories as shaped but not determined by structural
conditions, rejecting discourses about the inevitable decline of labour as a
political actor. Most importantly, the Brazilian case shows that political
engagement should be understood as a double-edged sword: on the one
hand, disengaging from politics can leave actors such as trade unions with-
outvoice; on the other hand, political influence can also change unions’
political demands, leading to conflicts between moderate and radical
agendas.
Notes
1. For a comprehensive review of the debate about globalization and labour
since the 1980s, see Verity Burgmann, Globalization and Labour in the
Twenty-First Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), loc. 951–1125. For
other recent critical literature in this field see also Ronaldo Munck,
Globalisation and Labour: The New ‘Great Transformation’ (London:
Zed, 2002); Stephanie Luce, Labor Movements: Global Perspectives
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014); Edward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries
Bezuidenhout, Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
2. Lowell Turner, “A Future for the Labour Movement?” In The
International Handbook of Labour Unions: Responses to Neo-liberalism,
edited by Gregor Gall, Richard Hurd, and Adrian Wilkinson, 311–27.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011: 321.
3. José R. Ramalho and Roberto Véras de Oliveira. “A atualidade do debate
sobre trabalho e desenvolvimento.” Cadernos CRH, 26(68) (2013):
211–5. For related arguments in the Asian context, see Kevin Gray,
Labour and Development in East Asia: Social Forces and Passive Revolution
(New York: Routledge, 2015) and Yoonkyung Lee, Militants or Partisans:
LABOUR MOVEMENTS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE DILEMMAS… 47
47. For example, John Kelly, “Theories of Collective Action and Union
Power,” in International Handbook on Labour Unions: Responses to Neo-
Liberalism, ed. G. Gall, R. Hurd and A. Wilkinson (Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 2011); Peter Gahan and Andreas Pekarek, “Social Movement
Theory, Collective Action Frames and Union Theory: A Critique and
Extension,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 51 (4) (2013), 754–
76; Donatella della Porta, “From Corporatist Unions to Protest Unions?
On the (Difficult) Relations Between Organized Labour and New Social
Movements,” in The Diversity of Democracy: Corporatism, Social Order
and Political Conflict, ed. Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006).
48. Upchurch and Mathers, “Neoliberal Globalization,” 268. Social move-
ment scholar Donatella della Porta has also called for renewed attention to
class and capitalism in social movement analysis to explain the anti-auster-
ity movements that emerged since the turn of the twentieth century, see
Donatella della Porta, Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing
Capitalism back into Protest Analysis (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 3–11.
49. Ernesto Laclau, “New Social Movements and the Plurality of the Social,”
In New Social Movements and the State in Latin America, ed. David Slater
(Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1985), 28–9.
50. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar, “Introduction:
The Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social Movements,” in
Cultures of Politics, Politics of Culture: Re-visioning Latin American Social
Movements, ed. Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 3.
51. John Gledhill, Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on
Politics (London: Pluto, 2000), 185–7.
52. George Philip and Francisco Panizza, The Triumph of Politics: The Return of
the Left in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 50.
53. Susan Eckstein, “Power and Popular Protest in Latin America,” in Power
and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989), 10.
54. Sydney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 3rd edition), loc.
4227.
55. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, “Introduction:
Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes – Toward a
Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements,” in
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities,
Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John
D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 3.
LABOUR MOVEMENTS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE DILEMMAS… 51
97. Rick Fantasia and Judith Stepan-Norris, “The Labor Movement in Motion,”
in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah
A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 557.
98. Fantasia and Voss, Hard Work, 81.
99. Darlington, “Union Militancy and Left-wing Leadership”.
100. Upchurch and Mathers, “Neoliberal Globalization,” 270.
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LABOUR MOVEMENTS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE DILEMMAS… 55
social, political, and administrative reform, which would change the nature
of the state and displace the hegemony of the oligarchy, but would not
attack the economic position of the oligarchy nor leave it without substan-
tial political power”.3
After he came to power, Vargas continued to face instability, with unrest
and armed revolt spreading from the mid-1930s onwards. The elite per-
ception was that the Communist Party was planning to take over, so
Vargas managed to pass a state of emergency in Congress and reacted to
opposition with increasing levels of repression. As a result of the cycle of
repression and instability, Vargas and his supporters became convinced
that the country needed someone who could prevent both the extreme
left and the extreme right from taking over political power. On November
10, 1937, a coup d’état resulted in a Vargas-led dictatorship that would
last until 1945. Under the influence of Vargas-supporting military officers,
the belief that a liberal-democratic state could not perform this function
or promote economic development became widespread.4 Instead, social
and economic reforms would be pursued under a nationalist authoritarian
regime—the Estado Nôvo (1937–1945)—which laid the basis for new
institutional structures and state-led economic development. Reflecting
the coalition that supported Vargas’ agenda, the Estado Nôvo therefore
formed the basis for a political compromise between traditional conserva-
tive forces and reformists, and between the military and civilians. The
Estado Nôvo was not only fundamental for the introduction of national
developmentalism but would also decisively shape the union movement’s
political position by introducing a corporatist framework which linked
trade unions to the state and incorporated them into the new develop-
mental project.
During the same period in Brazil, the Wall Street Crash and the Great
Depression manifested themselves politically in a shift towards nationalism
and national developmentalism, particularly as the international economy
had proven to be an unpredictable source of growth.5 The turn towards
state-led development not only increased the urban working class, a major
source of labour strength, but also raised concerns among the political class
because of the potentially disruptive role of workers’ strikes in strategic sec-
tors of the economy. Labour militancy therefore emerged at the intersection
of global and national economic change, while national developmentalism
evolved in response to the devastating impact of the global recession on
Brazil. The Brazilian export sector was seriously affected by the fall in global
commodity prices, which also brought the inflow of foreign capital to a halt.
LABOUR AND THE STATE: CORPORATISM AND THE LEFT, 1930–1977 63
The labour policies that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s can be consid-
ered the societal counterpart of the emerging interventionist state in
Brazil, as the government intended to minimize conflicts between labour
and capital in order to promote accelerated industrialization. Guillermo
O’Donnell has defined corporatism in a Latin American context in terms
of the state-controlled political representation of socio-economically
defined sectors of society, whereby
The basic principle of Brazilian corporatism was that the state organized and
controlled interest groups (both workers and employers) from above, which
effectively limited political participation outside of political parties to corpo-
ratist interaction mediated by the state.14 According to Erickson, the “sym-
metrical hierarchies of associations for employers and workers, assured
institutional contact between the two at all levels, and established the state
as arbiter between them”.15 In the corporatist system, interest groups such
as trade unions became integrated vertically in the state’s bureaucracy which,
as Schmitter argues, not only in strengthened state control but also sug-
gested a degree of mutual interest: “The social groups are linked vertically
to the upper strata, or at least the governing authorities, who in turn have a
LABOUR AND THE STATE: CORPORATISM AND THE LEFT, 1930–1977 65
special asymmetrical responsibility for the well being of those below them.”16
Brazil’s corporatist policies had three core elements: the idea of class har-
mony directed by the state, also known as trabalhismo; the political and legal
regulation of trade unions; and the expansion of social welfare. Another key
component of corporatist state-society relations was the principle that gov-
ernment structures had to be relatively autonomous from the pressures of
social and economic groups, or at least from the demands of those groups
that threatened to destabilize the government through excessive wage
demands or political unrest.17 At its core, the corporatist labour laws and
policies introduced during the Vargas regime represented an attempt to
control and regulate the increasingly militant urban working class. In this
respect, the corporatist arrangement’s purpose was to contain political radi-
calism and labour militancy, not only through legal provisions and social
policies but also through a new politics of progress and class harmony.
Getúlio Vargas introduced the idea of trabalhismo as a paternalistic ide-
ology that not only appealed to the loyalty of workers but also allowed
Vargas to mobilize them for electoral purposes.18 The leading motivation
was Vargas’ emphasis on his paternalistic role as the benefactor of the
working classes, a role enabled by the new labour laws and extended social
welfare provision. The linking of corporatism and populism was based on
the argument that peace, harmony, and the national interest would replace
class conflict, aided and abetted by the depoliticization of trade unions
through repressive and legal means, and their separation from radical
political ideologies and political parties. Trade unions were therefore
restructured so as to make them “instruments of social integration in the
nation-building process”,19 resulting in the creation of an official union
movement led by pelegos, or union leaders co-opted by the state. The sec-
ond part of this “ideology” was the attempt to turn the labour movement
into a political support base by setting up no less than two populist parties
in 1945, the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (Brazilian Labour Party, PTB)
based on the official trade unions and other groups that supported Vargas,
and the Partido Social Democrático (Social-Democratic Party, PSD), for
which he was a presidential candidate in 1951.20 Although Vargas’ legacy
for Brazilian politics is perhaps not quite as far reaching as that of his con-
temporary Juan Perón in Argentina, from the perspective of labour poli-
tics, the official trade unions and their pelego leaders continued to form a
significant force within the union movement up to the present day, while
corporatist labour laws have continued to shape industrial relations and
trade union behaviour under both authoritarian and democratic regimes.
66 M. RIETHOF
The right to strike was also highly regulated and only allowed in the period
of annual collective bargaining (known as the data-base).25 By holding col-
lective negotiations in sectors with strong unions at different times of the
year, the Labour Ministry arranged the collective bargaining cycle in such
a way that strong unions could never negotiate at the same time, thereby
avoiding the escalation of strikes. If a collective agreement proved impos-
sible to reach, an absolute majority of a union’s membership with a quo-
rum of two-thirds of the membership had to vote in favour of going on
strike. Although the state’s official role was to mediate in collective con-
flicts, the labour law also allowed intervention in the financial and political
affairs of unions.26 (This provision was only removed in the 1988
Constitution.) In cases where a strike was declared illegal by the labour
court—either for procedural reasons or because the strike did not take
place within the framework of collective bargaining—the state could inter-
vene in the union by removing its leaders from their posts and holding
new union elections to replace the recalcitrant leaders.27 The leadership of
trade unions was also effectively co-opted by the prospect of benefits and
jobs provided by the Labour Ministry. For example, apart from legal pro-
fessionals, a proportion of labour court judges were representatives of
employers and unions, or juizes classistas (“class judges”).28 A job as a
labour court judge entailed few working hours and high wages, offering a
popular employment opportunity for some union leaders.29
Another purpose of the Labour Code was to promote social harmony
through the distribution of welfare payments to workers, turning trade
unions away from militancy to service provision. Corporatism’s welfare
dimension functioned as an important instrument of corporatist regula-
tion, as workers were subject of state control in exchange for their inclu-
sion in social security legislation. Crucially, the social security system
excluded those without a stable income, stable employment, or those in
the informal sector,30 creating a segmented labour market and “providing
overprotection to core workers in the modern sector at the expense of the
underprotection of labor in general”.31 These policies primarily targeted
the urban working class working in the formal sector but excluded rural
workers, while the middle class benefited from increased public employ-
ment in the expanding state bureaucracy.
Scholars have drawn attention to how these policies shaped citizenship
practices in Brazil, effectively creating differentiated citizenship rights, as a
result of which people outside of the formal labour market—often migrants
living in illegal and precarious conditions in Brazil’s growing cities—were
68 M. RIETHOF
citizens in the formal sense but lacked the substantive rights that the urban
working class had received under Vargas.32 This system not only marginal-
ized significant parts of the urban and rural population but also depoliti-
cized the trade unions: “the state constituted urban workers as special
citizens by bestowing social rights they had never had and celebrating a
dignity of labor it had never recognized. However, it did so as the means
to absorb them into its legal and administrative orders. Vargas reformu-
lated the citizenship of workers precisely to eviscerate any alternative public
sphere of autonomous working-class organization.”33 Despite these limita-
tions, national social security legislation and the trade union provision of
social services still functioned as a redistributive mechanism in a highly
unequal society34 but only for a limited proportion of the population.
In sum, the corporatist framework allowed the state to limit labour
militancy in several ways: it could shape the outcome of union elections by
controlling who could run for elected posts, usually on the basis of the
candidates’ political agendas, and it could ensure that the unions focused
on non-political and non-militant activities by limiting their use of funds
to welfare rather than political activities. The political impact on the union
movement was that representatives of the official trade unions thought
they would benefit more from bargaining with the state, often via non-
working class politicians, than from strikes and direct collective bargaining
with employers, particularly as access to the government became more
rewarding than strikes. Corporatism therefore consolidated the union
movement’s subordinate relationship to the state as “official trade union-
ism derived its strength not from its membership but from its relationship
to the elites holding state power”.35 This effect was also visible in the
forced separation of union action in the economic sphere from the politi-
cal activity of the new mass parties as unionists tended to focus trade union
activity on the state and the judicial system as the crucial mediators in
industrial relations, instead of on employers.36
Corporatism’s long-lasting impact on Brazilian labour politics has raised
the question whether such high levels of state control quashed labour mili-
tancy in the twentieth century, thereby weakening Brazil’s union move-
ment for decades to come. Paradoxically, while corporatist regulation
functioned to constrain militancy in many cases, it also created organiza-
tional resources for labour opposition, as seen in the strike wave in the late
1970s which radicalized a new generation of workers. Underlying this
question is the dynamic analysed above, which simultaneously subordinated
LABOUR AND THE STATE: CORPORATISM AND THE LEFT, 1930–1977 69
the unions and offered benefits such as legal recognition and financial
resources37 while excluding significant sectors of society. A related argu-
ment is that the demographic changes that Brazil experienced in this period
weakened unions’ structural power by creating a labour surplus due to high
levels of rural-urban migration38 that resulted from poverty and “the more
or less intact persistence of traditional modes of production and authority
in rural areas”.39 However, the reality in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury was more complicated as political developments and demographic
changes pulled the union movement both towards militancy and moderate
political strategies. For example, while rural-urban migration helped to
moderate trade union strategies, John French interprets the rise of worker
militancy as due to a shift in the labour market from artisanal, skilled work-
ers, to semi-skilled industrial workers in large cities.40 At the beginning of
the twentieth century, artisanal workers (and particularly the anarcho-syn-
dicalists among them) played a formative role in the labour movement.
Their strong position was undermined by the emergence of large-scale fac-
tory production and work organization, which facilitated the rise of mod-
ern trade unions. Through immigration from Europe to Latin America,
socialism, communism, and anarcho-syndicalism became widely known,
which inspired the emergence of more politically engaged trade unionism
and the rise of major left-wing parties.
Trade unions were therefore not just the passive victims of government
control, as some unions had radical leaders willing to challenge state inter-
vention and employers. For example, in his study of the Communist Party
(Partido Comunista Brasileiro, PCB) and organized labour, Santana
argues that while the party leadership focused on parliamentary strategies
and alliances, many of its affiliated unions continued to engage in militant
strike action.41 Economic development and the rise of urban manufactur-
ing activity in particular led to an increase in trade union attempts to assert
workers’ demands, while factory commissions involved in wage bargaining
existed in many companies in the state of São Paulo from the 1950s
onwards.42 Many unionists also recognized the potentially positive aspects
of government control, as regulation of the union movement implied that
unions could have a legally recognized position in society.43 Although the
effects of corporatism and the characteristics of the Brazilian labour market
certainly affected labour militancy, it did not eradicate political radicalism
as evident in the 1950s and 1960s when Brazilian politics became increas-
ingly turbulent and polarized.
70 M. RIETHOF
Due to the centralization of wage policy and the repression of trade unions,
collective bargaining became effectively meaningless, as the decision to
increase wages was transferred to the federal government. The military
presidents used their power to limit union action and wage demands as
part of their overall objective to deepen industrialization, which they saw
as essential to national security.
During the first years of the military regime, economic stabilization
dominated the government’s development agenda, resulting in a long-
term negative impact on real wages and the income distribution. The
regime also intervened heavily in the economy and established new state-
owned enterprises,60 while the second National Development Plan (for the
years 1974–1979) promoted further state intervention and state owner-
ship in sectors such as steel, oil, and petrochemicals.61 In addition, the
government inaugurated massive infrastructural and industrial projects,
including the Trans-Amazon highway, which it viewed as necessary for the
country’s integration; hydroelectric dams (e.g., the Itaipu dam in south-
ern Brazil); and industrial projects such as a national aeronautical industry
to produce light passenger and military aircrafts. This economic agenda,
together with the diversification of exports and Brazil’s improving terms
of trade at the end of the 1960s, contributed to the “Brazilian miracle”
between 1968 and 1973, with average annual growth rates of 11.3%. One
of the most important engines of economic growth during the miracle
years was the automobile sector dominated by multinational corpora-
tions,62 which helped create the roots of militant labour opposition to the
military regime in the late 1970s. The growing workforce in these indus-
tries and the sector’s strategic importance for the Brazilian economy pro-
vided the workers with a significant source of structural power, which
turned them into a central actor in the opposition to the military regime.
In political terms, the military’s approach to a potential return to civil-
ian rule planted the seeds for opposition, which unintentionally created
political spaces for grassroots movements to oppose authoritarianism. The
military envisioned a return to a civilian regime or a form of electoral
democracy at some stage in the future, which created a fundamental con-
tradiction between the military’s pursuit of political legitimacy and their
attempt to keep control over the political liberalization process.63 The mili-
tary leadership initially defined legitimacy in terms of the regime’s “suc-
cess” in returning the country to order but as renewed opposition emerged
in the early 1970s, the military looked for alternative sources of legitimacy
by initiating a controlled political liberalization process. The regime’s drive
74 M. RIETHOF
3.5 Conclusion
The analysis of the transformation of the labour movement in the early- to
mid-twentieth century illustrates the interconnections between the emerg-
ing working class, corporatism, and state-led development. The govern-
ment’s ability to regulate and control labour became a central feature of the
Brazilian state’s interventionist strategies in this period. This process stimu-
lated industrialization while simultaneously contributing to the emergence
of a large working class, whose militancy would open up spaces for orga-
nized labour’s political role. Nevertheless, the political and economic tur-
moil of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including the pressure of popular
demands for wage increases and social reforms, threatened the country’s
stability in the eyes of the military. The new regime tightened its control
over unions and wage determination in 1964, using the existing labour
legislation to promote stability and economic growth. As the following
chapters discuss in more detail, the institutional, ideational, and political
framework for labour relations constructed between 1930 and 1964 contin-
ued to play a significant role in the formation of trade union strategies
76 M. RIETHOF
Notes
1. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical
Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) 29.
2. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens,
Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 156.
3. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 171.
4. Kenneth P. Erickson, The Brazilian Corporative State and Working Class
Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 17.
5. Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and
Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 246.
6. The fate of the coffee export economy illustrates the continuing role of
primary exports before and during the introduction of import-substitution
policies, although the product became less significant towards the end of
the twentieth century: the share of coffee exports in total exports declined
from 62.9% in 1930 to 56.1% in 1950 and 12.3% in 1980; however, the
share of manufactured products increased from 13.5% in 1940 to 44.8% in
1980. See Marcelo P. de Abreu, Afonso S. Bevilacqua, and Demosthenes
M. Pinho, “Import Substitution and Growth in Brazil, 1890s–1970s,” in
An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, Vol. 3, ed.
Enrique Cárdenas, José A. Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp (London:
Palgrave, 2000), 169.
7. Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State,
and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
66–7.
8. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since
Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209, 228.
9. Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development (Westport:
Praeger, 1995), 36–7; Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 221; Thomas
E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 43.
10. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 239–7, 252–8.
LABOUR AND THE STATE: CORPORATISM AND THE LEFT, 1930–1977 77
35. John D. French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances
in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992), 5.
36. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 187; French, Brazilian
Workers’ ABC, 253–4; Schmitter, Interest Conflict, 122.
37. French, Brazilian Workers’ ABC, 137–9.
38. Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile,
Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1986); Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 63–73.
39. Schmitter, Interest Conflict, 372.
40. French, Brazilian Workers’ ABC.
41. Marco Aurélio Santana, Homens partidos: Comunistas e sindicatos no Brasil
(São Paulo: Boitempo, 2001); Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political
Arena, 388.
42. The state of São Paulo concentrated the majority of industrial workers in
Brazil: the percentage of industrial workers in São Paulo compared to the
whole of Brazil increased from 38% in 1939, to 41% in 1949 and 46.6% in
1959. See Renato Colistete, Labour Relations and Industrial Performance
in Brazil: Greater São Paulo, 1945–60 (London: Palgrave, 2001), 4.
43. French, Brazilian Workers’ ABC. Barros, Labour Relations.
44. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 507–9, 513; Paulo Rabello
de Castro and Marcio Ronci, “Sixty Years of Populism in Brazil,” in The
Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch and
Sebastian Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 158–61.
45. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 380–1.
46. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 382.
47. Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 132–3.
48. Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Relatório final da Comissão Nacional da
Verdade, Vol. I (Brasília: CNV, 2014), 91.
49. Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 158; Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 169.
50. Luiz Orenstein and Antonio C. Sochaczewski, “Democracia com desen-
volvimento: 1956–1961,” in A ordem do progresso: Cem anos de política
econômica republicana, 1889–1989, ed. Marcelo de Paiva Abreu (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1990), 179.
51. Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 211.
52. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 225–226; Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 157.
53. O’Donnell, “Corporatism and the Question”; Fernando H. Cardoso,
(1979) “On the Characterization of Authoritarian Regimes in Latin
America,” in The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, ed. David
Collier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 41–3; David Collier,
“Overview of the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Model,” in The New
Authoritarianism in Latin America, ed. David Collier (Princeton: Princeton
80 M. RIETHOF
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82 M. RIETHOF
The strike movement that emerged in the late 1970s challenged state
intervention in labour relations, thereby linking wage demands with the
struggle for democratization. Its focus on worker mobilization and mili-
tancy, both in the workplace and in its engagement with national and local
politics, created the new unionist movement. Where this movement dif-
fered from the unionism that had developed before the 1964 coup was in
its pursuit of democratic workplace relations, autonomy from the state,
and stronger connections with social movements, working-class commu-
nities, and the PT. New unionism’s history of militancy also became a his-
tory of political success, which trade unionists continued to reference as a
benchmark for successful labour action. For example, according to Herbert
de Souza (Betinho),1 one of the leading figures of the pro-democracy
movement,
The CUT has a history of rebellion, courage and strength. It was born from
and fed by the experience of struggle. It grew, widening its bases, learning to
struggle and to create dialogues, occupy spaces, make proposals and valorise
the freedom of expression, organization and autonomy in relation to the state.
Between the first strike wave in 1978 and the foundation of the CUT in
1983, labour militancy peaked in response to the dynamics of political
liberalization, state repression, and regressive wage policies. The process
of gradual political liberalization combined with growing societal dissatis-
faction with government policies in this period explains how trade union-
ists translated their protests against centralized wage policies into a
challenge to authoritarianism and repression. It can be argued that the
dynamics of the military regime’s relationship with civil society politicized
labour action in the late 1970s as wage demands became connected to the
union activists’ realization that effective union action could only develop
in a democratic context. During this period labour militancy increased
despite and often in response to violent repression and state intervention
in union affairs. This repression forced unionists to engage in grassroots
mobilizing in the workplace and neighbourhoods, which became one of
the hallmarks of new unionism. Through their protests, trade unions
established themselves as a crucial actor in the democratization process,
constructing a democratization agenda spurred by mass mobilization and
labour militancy but also rooted in grassroots democracy in the workplace
and community activism.
88 M. RIETHOF
This dynamic also shifted the strikes from the shop floor to the streets,
changing the organizational characteristics of new unionism, moving
away, to some extent, from the personal conversations cited by the union
leaders Rossi, Bargas, and Barbosa, to more strongly coordinated action,
decision-making in large assemblies, comandos de greve (strike comman-
dos), pickets in factories and neighbourhoods. In the case of the 1980
metalworkers’ strike, Barbosa de Macedo shows how the strikes had
“spilled into the streets of São Bernardo do Campo”, turning the working-
class neighbourhoods in Greater São Paulo, where most of the strike lead-
ers lived, into a site of struggle.50 Due to the high levels of repression, the
strike organizers relied not only on their union to disseminate information
but also on their social networks, family, and friendships to mobilize peo-
ple. During this strike, as Barbosa de Macedo describes, picketing shifted
from the factory gates to bus stops, bars, and the door step, thereby mobi-
lizing people and maintaining their morale over the course of the strike,
which contributed “to an increasing politicization of the spaces and rela-
tionships within the workers’ everyday lives”.51 These examples underline
that while the striking workers occupied a structurally powerful position in
strategic sectors of the economy, due to the repressive and economically
difficult context they often relied on community and other social networks
to sustain their actions. While these networks and social movement sup-
port helped sustain strike action despite the threat of repression, thus
turning into a central aspect of the pro-democracy movement more gener-
ally, union organizers also became concerned about their position in the
country’s political future as the military government began to introduce
democratic elections, leading to internal debates about the PT’s electoral
involvement and the best way to achieve workers’ demands in a new politi-
cal arena.
1970s, Rossi believed that the Union Oppositions in Greater São Paulo
were neither divided into political factions nor dictated by political parties.
He nevertheless noticed a shift from union activism to party politics, which
began to spark debates about the desirability of electoral participation and
the political goals that workers should pursue. Rossi viewed the struggle for
political power as divisive, resulting in the left arguing mainly with itself
rather than getting on with the workers’ struggle, but he hoped that union
activists would return to union action soon after participating in the elec-
tions.52 Others wanted to establish a new party that reflected the principles
of new unionism, allowing unionists to extend their political agenda from
the workplace and the communities to the formal political arena, resulting
in the PT’s foundation in February 1980. Due to these differing expecta-
tions of what a workers’ party could achieve, the foundation of the PT not
only raised questions about the relationship between the unions and the
party in organizational, strategic, and political terms but also came to
encapsulate many of the political and strategic dilemmas faced by the new
unionists in the 1980s.
As a new party on Brazil’s political scene, the PT reflected the social
movement opposition of the 1970s, including groups such as the new
unionists, the student movement, progressive Catholics, and academics.
The idea to found a workers’ party first emerged in metalworkers’ confer-
ences in 1979 but the participants in the debates soon realized that they
had to broaden the party’s appeal and scope in discussion with social
movement representatives and MDB politicians such as Fernando
Henrique Cardoso—although the latter never joined the PT. The party
not only emerged from the same socio-political transformations as the
new unionism movement, but it also occupied a new space on the left of
the political spectrum, attractive to social movement activists and people
who had become disillusioned with the existing political parties.53 In the
early years, the party unapologetically viewed itself as a “political project
for workers to achieve power, thus creating the conditions for social trans-
formation towards a society without exploitation and on the road to
socialism”.54 This agenda clearly appealed to the many new unionists who
not only wanted democracy but also social change, particularly as the party
identified itself as a channel for the political articulation of social move-
ment demands based on grassroots decision-making.55 Although many
new unionists participated enthusiastically in the PT’s foundation, the
unions associated with UnS and traditionally connected with the PCB
rejected the PT, partly because the PT would compete with the PCB and
NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 97
also because they feared that the PT’s radicalism could jeopardize the tran-
sition.56 Other than mirroring the political divisions that had emerged
within the union movement, the PT’s electoral concerns resonated within
organized labour as the democratic transition progressed, eventually turn-
ing into a source of political moderation. Apart from founding the PT as
an expression of new unionism’s political agenda, labour activists also
began thinking about uniting the union movement to strengthen its polit-
ical position at a national level.
The first step towards unifying labour’s political agenda and institution-
alizing the new unionist movement was the decision to establish a national
union organization. In August 1981, after months of regional meetings
and discussions, 5000 representatives from over 1000 unions, represent-
ing all political groupings in the trade unions, together with international
observers, met in the National Congress of the Working Classes (Congresso
Nacional das Classes Trabalhadoras—CONCLAT).57 CONCLAT’s ambi-
tious purpose was not only to institutionalize and unify the union move-
ment nationally but also to develop a joint political agenda focused on
wages and working conditions, labour reform, and democracy. CONCLAT
participants voiced demands related to working conditions, wages, and
employment, including reducing the working week and the end of wage
adjustment by government decree. They also demanded the reform of the
corporatist labour relations system, with special reference to union auton-
omy, the liberalization of the right to strike, and the right to unionize for
public sector workers. Moreover, the CONCLAT resolutions included a
series of democratic changes, such as the end of repression, amnesty, and
the establishment of a constituent assembly.58
However, rather than unifying the union movement, the debates
reflected the different political and strategic considerations that had
emerged within the various groupings. According to a conference report,
despite negotiations that lasted all night—in the hope that “the partici-
pants were sufficiently mature to overcome party-political and ideologi-
cal questions”59—the various groupings could not agree on a single list
of candidates for the committee that would found a national organiza-
tion. They formed two competing lists instead,60 broadly corresponding
to Unidade Sindical and the new unionists respectively, the latter led by
Lula. As the report described, “[t]he atmosphere before the plenary vote
was tense. In a matter of seconds, representatives of both lists had impro-
vised pieces of paper with the numbers 1 and 2”,61 effectively creating an
impasse between the two positions until a committee was finally elected
98 M. RIETHOF
After the successful strikes of the late 1970s, labour activists discovered
that they had to redefine some of their demands and ideas about militancy,
negotiation, and political participation. In contrast with the late 1970s,
Brazil experienced a severe economic downturn in the early 1980s, which
led to a reduction of private sector strikes as well as an increased emphasis
on political strikes and demonstrations at a national level.64 In the late
1970s, workers’ realization that wages did not reflect economic growth
and inflation rates had provoked the strike movement, but the economic
context worsened significantly as Mexico’s default on its external debt in
1982 triggered a region-wide economic crisis. During this period, the
political system also gradually became normalized through the introduc-
tion of several formal aspects of democracy, namely a new party system and
democratic elections at all levels except the presidency.65 As the opportuni-
ties for democratic participation evolved, the opposition’s focus became
more diffuse and, in some respects, more complicated. The transition’s
increasingly institutional focus meant that the opposition was split between
political parties which positioned themselves at the forefront of political
negotiations and the social movement opposition (including the trade
unions), the latter generally more sceptical about the benefits of negotia-
tion while wanting to maintain civil society’s political influence during and
after the transition. When negotiation and political participation became
concrete possibilities, even if civil society still faced political restrictions
and repression, the opposition’s emphasis began to shift from the military
regime to questions about the shape of democratic politics as well as the
distribution of wealth and income, complemented by the difficult task of
redefining the union agenda in an era of economic crisis.66 The union
movement itself experienced growing divisions along party-political lines,
with the differences that had emerged within CONCLAT solidifying dur-
ing this period. The argument here is that labour mobilization became
more difficult due to repression and job losses, which meant that the new
100 M. RIETHOF
Although the party’s nature and history meant that unions as a political
constituency and a source of leadership were crucial for its strength as a
political organization, functioning merely as a political front for social
movements could limit the party’s electoral appeal. The PT attempted to
resolve the issue by stating that unions could not be used for party-political
purposes or organized along party-political lines, while also arguing that
labour conflicts were inherently political,89 recognizing the political impact
of the strikes while also differentiating the role of the party and the unions.
The CUT also saw its role as different from political parties: “[t]he CUT
engages in class struggle through labour conflicts, articulating economic
struggles with political objectives … to aim for the construction of a social-
ist society, but it should not be confused with a political party and always
maintains its autonomy in relation to state power and parties.”90 The real-
ity of their relationship was rather different as the party became inextrica-
bly linked with new unionism while the PT and the union movement had
many activists in common, resulting in the PT and the CUT experiencing
similar political and strategic divisions.
Both the new unionist movement and the PT held heated debates
about the position of the internal political groupings that emerged from
the strike movement, which also included questions about the PT’s role
within individual unions and the representation of political and ideological
differences within the CUT and the PT. These debates showed that “the
party walked a fine discursive line between recognizing its identity as a
class party and attempting to transcend its class language and concerns”.91
Despite its central role in new unionism and the PT, the emphasis on
grassroots activism and social movements posed problems as the party’s
grassroots, bottom-up model was not always easy to maintain or to
reconcile with electoral strategies. For example, in 1984, in the PT’s own
evaluation the party had registered 220 PT circles in the state of São Paulo
but many of them had already disappeared “because the space reserved for
the núcleos (grassroots circles) had never been clearly defined within the
party’s power structure”.92 This debate is exemplified by a 1985 article
published in the PT magazine Boletim Nacional about a CUT internal
debate, reporting that several participants felt that there was a lack of
information about the role and presence of the PT within the union move-
ment. The PT’s response was to propose the creation of party núcleos in
trade unions as well as integrating union representation within the party
organization. To strengthen the party message within the unions, the
party argued that petista (PT-supporting) union leaders needed to
NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 105
maintain “their organic link” with the party in their union activism: “the
petista militant should talk like a worker, constantly reflecting the general
demands of workers.”93 This debate echoes the tensions within new union-
ism between the grassroots union activists who believed that workers’ real
power was located in workplace mobilization and representation while the
dominant groups within new unionism veered towards a more explicitly
political agenda.
As a result of these tensions between grassroots mobilization and party
discipline, the PT experienced internal divisions similar to the CUT; the
political groupings had also become institutionalized within the party as
conflicts arose not only about the party’s relationship with grassroots
activists but also concerning the voters the party would target. In the
1985 debate cited in the previous paragraph, some participants argued
that political divisions weakened the unions while others remarked that
allowing political and ideological differences within the unions and the
party was democratic,94 reflecting the party’s ideals of political pluralism.
Regarding the latter point of view, the report cited Raul Pont, then a
member of the PT’s Diretório Nacional (National Executive), as arguing
that the party needed to find a common denominator among the multi-
plicity of political views, expecting that this heterogeneity would
strengthen rather than weaken the party.95 In other words, representing a
wide s pectrum of political views would allow the party to cast the widest
possible net to attract progressive voters while keeping radical political
activists within the party fold, people who would otherwise have joined
parties to the left of the PT. However, problems emerged when the politi-
cal differences created conflicts and undermined the movement’s unified
message, mirroring the political divisions within the union movement. As
in the CUT, within the PT the direito de tendência (the right to partici-
pate in the party as a distinct political group) was officially recognized at
the party’s national congress in 1986, but only as long as these groups
obeyed the general party line. The party leadership also argued that it did
not just tolerate any political views nor did it function “as a front for
political organizations”, as illustrated when it expelled a number of PT
militants who robbed a bank in Salvador to raise money for the Nicaraguan
revolution.96 These examples show how the PT’s political debates became
closely intertwined with the union movement in the early to mid-1980s,
signalling that the party’s electoral concerns and political agenda had also
begun to shape the labour movement’s strategies. Widening the PT’s
106 M. RIETHOF
In response to this and to broaden the party’s electoral appeal, the party
started to expand its conception of class, moving beyond its roots in the
trade union movement. During the 1980s, although the PT continued to
view the working class (classe operária) as the most important political
constituency in strategic terms, the party started to include rural workers,
the marginalized and excluded, the informal sector, and the middle class.100
These debates demonstrate that mass mobilizations in the campaign for
direct presidential elections in 1984–1985 showed both the PT and the
CUT saw the potential benefits of a broad-based alliance and began to
recognize that alliances could also be of use in future elections.
To conclude this section, the drop in labour militancy in the early 1980s
highlights the combined effect of the worsening economic conditions and
repression on strikes. However, labour militancy increased again in 1983 in
response to growing discontent with the government’s austerity measures,
NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 107
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991
Total Public Private
Fig. 4.1 Public and private sector strikes—1984–1991. (Public sector strikes
include strikes in state-owned companies in this figure. Source: DIEESE, “Balanço
das greves em 2013,” Estudos e Pesquisas 79 (2015), 42)
role of trade unions … with that of a political party, as in the PT’s case”.112
These internal discussions illustrate the close but sometimes constrained
relations between the unions and the party, as the CUT faced the decision
whether to participate in the Constituent Assembly and the PT began to
prepare for the 1989 presidential elections.
The Constituent Assembly held in 1987 and 1988 was a major oppor-
tunity for the union movement and progressive sectors in Brazilian society
to introduce some of their demands into the national political arena. The
Assembly was set up to facilitate broad-based participation so that civil
society organizations could make proposals (“popular initiatives”) by col-
lecting a sufficient number of signatures to back a particular proposal. For
the majority of the CUT, the Assembly represented an opportunity to
open up the democratic decision-making process, moving the political
debate away from the formal political arena back to civil society.113
Left-
wing groups within the CUT initially opposed the Constituent
Assembly,114 proposing to delegitimize the decision-making process
through mobilizations but eventually decided to participate in an attempt
to strengthen workers’ rights under the democratic regime.115 Labour
issues formed a prominent part of the constitutional debates and the rea-
son why social and labour rights were included in the first place was the
result of social movement and union pressure. To put pressure on the
constitutional debate, the CUT distributed hundreds of thousands of
pamphlets in support of its proposals, with photos of Assembly members
suspected of voting against the CUT’s agenda, and also organizing sym-
bolic stoppages and marches in Brasília to underline their demands.116 The
unions’ proposals ensured that principles such as union autonomy from
the state and the right of unionization within the public sector were now
constitutionally enshrined. Furthermore, the Constitution made union
participation in collective bargaining obligatory, legalized workplace rep-
resentation, and removed the military’s restrictions on the right to strike.117
Despite these positive outcomes, the union movement as a whole had
been unable to reach a consensus on labour reform, resulting in a half-
hearted attempt at reform of the corporatist system. In fact, although the
Constitution established freedom of association and organizational auton-
omy from the state, it maintained several important pillars of the corporatist
system—particularly the monopoly of representation and the compulsory
union tax.118 Trade union participation in the Constituent Assembly illus-
trates a shift towards the new unionists’ gradual acceptation that political
participation could be a valuable strategy in a democratic context, inevitably
112 M. RIETHOF
4.5 Conclusion
The late 1970s and 1980s are often considered to be the heyday of labour
militancy in Brazil, leaving not only a legacy of successful militant political
strategies but also sharp conflicts between militant and moderate groups
within the union movement about issues such as the workers’ position in
the formal political arena, including relations with the PT, appropriate
responses to the economic crisis, and labour’s political agenda under a
democratic regime. Despite the legacy of successful militancy, however,
this chapter has argued that confrontation and negotiation often func-
tioned as interdependent approaches, as the union movement’s response
to the rapidly changing economic and political circumstances changed the
balance between the two strategies. The dynamics of labour and political
conflict in the late 1970s and 1980s demonstrate that labour conflicts
experienced cycles of militancy and moderation, conditioned both by
developments in the national economic and political context, mediated by
the union movement’s own debates about its strategies and political
position.
The conditions in the late 1970s illustrate the effect of repression and
political exclusion on strike action, giving rise to new unionism’s famed
militancy and innovative approach to worker mobilization. Building on the
rapidly developing grassroots opposition to authoritarianism, the new
unionists politicized labour conflicts by organizing strikes and other forms
of militant action in the most dynamic sectors of the Brazilian economy.
Their confrontational strategies focused not only on pressurizing employ-
ers to meet their wage demands but also on establishing the conditions for
effective direct negotiation, as the story of the strike movement in Greater
São Paulo shows. As the democratic transition evolved and the economic
circumstances worsened, union leaders attempted to replicate these achieve-
ments with renewed ebbs and flows of militancy and mobilization but they
were not always successful, as seen in the case of the general strikes in the
NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 113
1980s. The imminent transition to civilian rule turned the political repre-
sentation of workers’ interests into a central question for trade unionists,
creating internal debates about political strategies and sparking differences
between militant and pragmatic groups. These debates focused in particu-
lar on whether the union movement should continue to operate outside
the formal political arena, pressurizing the government to respond to
workers’ demands. While this strategy had proven to be effective during
the strike movement, the new unionists struggled to link immediate con-
cerns about job losses and wage cuts to mass mobilization against austerity
plans. The evolution of the union movement’s relationship with the PT in
this period shows how party-political and electoral considerations entered
the debate, as union leaders valued their autonomy but also recognized the
potential of acting through a political party, resulting in a gradual shift
towards a greater acceptance of negotiation.
Notes
1. Herbert de Souza, quoted in “Dignidade para quem faz o país,” De Fato
September (1993), 22.
2. “As multinacionais fabricam a miséria”: a media headline shown
in the documentary “Greve!” (“Strike!”) about the 1979 metalworkers’
strike in Greater São Paulo (directed by João Batista de Andrade, 1979).
3. As shown in the documentary “Greve!”.
4. Eduardo Noronha, “A explosão das greves na década de 80,” in O sindi-
calismo brasileiro nos anos 80, ed. Armando Boito Jr. (Rio de Janeiro: Paz
e Terra, 1990), 105.
5. Iram J. Rodrigues, “A trajetória do novo sindicalismo,” in O novo sindi-
calismo: Vinte anos depois, ed. Iram J. Rodrigues (São Paulo: Vozes,
1999), 76–7; Leigh A. Payne, “Working Class Strategies in the Transition
to Democracy in Brazil,” Comparative Politics 23(2) (1991): 229.
6. Although the metalworkers’ strikes are the best-known aspect of the late
1970s protests, significant strikes also occurred outside the urban centres
of Brazil’s southeast. Sugarcane workers went on strike in 1979 in the
northeastern state of Pernambuco but did not develop the same political
agenda as the metalworkers’ unions. According to Pereira, their position
reflected the historical “reality that democratic rights had been extended
differentially in Brazil and that some unions had greater rights to consulta-
tion than others”, which facilitated the politicization of union action in the
southeast, Anthony W. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor
Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988 (Pittsburgh PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 70. See also Robert J. Alexander, A History of
Organized Labor in Brazil (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2003), 175–7.
114 M. RIETHOF
19. “Entrevista Gilson Menezes”. The company and police reaction to the
strike give an indication of how the workers had organized the action in
secret. A Delegacia de Ordem Social (DOS) document shows that the com-
pany had searched the workers’ lockers for evidence of advance organiza-
tion and found a handwritten note in a coat pocket with the text (in English)
“Good nigth goes stoped Monday, day 15 [sic],” which the company
denounced to the police. Several workers were detained but they denied
any connection with the strike, claiming they did not speak English, after
which the case was closed. Delegacia de Ordem Social, Dossiês Movimentos
Grevistas/Auto, Vítima: Saab-Scania do Brasil S/A, OS 0378, 1978.
20. “Entrevista Gilson Menezes”.
21. A 1983 PT evaluation of the strike movement viewed the motive for the
strikes between 1978 and 1980 as primarily economic with implicit politi-
cal dimensions, PT, “Movimento sindical,” Boletim Nacional, November
20, 1983, 8–10. See also, Margaret E. Keck, Workers’ Party and
Democratization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 260; Leôncio
Martins Rodrigues, “As tendências políticas na formação das centrais sin-
dicais,” in O sindicalismo brasileiro nos anos 80, ed. Armando Boito Jr. (Rio
de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991), 29, fn 31.
22. According to Osvaldo Bargas, secretary-general of the Sindicato dos
Metalúrgicos de São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema in the early
1980s, Ford workers had more freedom to organize while Scania and
Volkswagen isolated the union. Interview transcript with Osvaldo Bargas,
Transnationals Information Exchange archive, box 38, International
Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (1982), 3–4.
23. Barbara C. Samuels, Managing Risk in Developing Countries: National
Demands and Multinational Responses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990), 63–5.
24. Mario dos Santos Barbosa, “Sindicalismo em tempos de crise: A experiência
na Volkswagen do Brasil” (MA diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
2002), 85–7.
25. Alves, State and Opposition, 196.
26. In addition, Sluyter-Beltrão attributes the union leadership’s ability to
convince the workers to end the strike to Lula’s “charismatic authority”
and the growing centralization of power in the metalworkers’ union,
indicating a shift away from the grassroots, see Jeffrey Sluyter-Beltrão,
Rise and Decline of Brazil’s New Unionism: The Politics of the Central
Única dos Trabalhadores (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 94–5.
27. Alves, State and Opposition, 198.
28. Reconstrução de Lutas Operárias, “Comissões de Fábrica em São Paulo:
Dados sobre comissões de fábrica no estado de São Paulo, sua origem, lutas,
composição, estatutos e outros itens,” Caderno 6 (São Paulo: Reconstrução,
1985), 3.
116 M. RIETHOF
29. On the intersection between the strike movement and women’s movements
in the late 1970s, see Sonia E. Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil:
Women’s Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 105–7. On the role of the Catholic Church, see
Scott Mainwaring, The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Kenneth P. Serbin, “The
Catholic Church, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Brazil,” in
Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions, and Processes, ed. Peter R. Kingstone
and Timothy J. Power (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press),
144–61.
30. Santana, “Ditadura militar,” 293–4.
31. Thomas C. Bruneau, The Church in Brazil: The Politics of Religion (Austin
TX: University of Texas at Austin, 1982), 101; Daniel Zirker, “The
Brazilian Church-State Crisis of 1980: Effective Nonviolent Action in a
Military Dictatorship”, in Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical
Perspective, ed. by Stephen Zunes, Lester Kurtz, and Sarah B. Asher
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 259–78.
32. One such organization is the Centro Pastoral Vergueiro in central São
Paulo, established in 1973 and home to a unique archive on social move-
ment struggles in the 1970s and 1980s.
33. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and
Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 238.
34. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance, 208.
35. Rodrigues, “As tendências políticas”, 17.
36. Rodrigues, “As tendências políticas”, 28.
37. The communist parties supported the moderate sectors within the labour
movement for reasons related to the history of Brazilian communism.
Throughout its existence, the PCB had supported a class alliance with the
progressive elements of the national bourgeoisie, based on an assumed
political convergence with working-class interests against international
capital’s influence in Brazil. During the dictatorship, the party saw unions
as a way to “reactivate” the workers’ movement, encouraging party mem-
bers to become union activists. The party argued that Brazil first required
liberal democracy and national capitalist development before a revolution
could be contemplated. This position continued during the military
regime, when the PCB focused on creating a broad-based anti-authoritar-
ian movement within the opposition party MDB. During the transition,
the PCB associated itself with the party it expected to be in power after
the return to democracy, the MDB and later the PMDB (Partido do
Movimento Democrático do Brasil, Brazilian Democratic Movement
Party), even using the MDB as an electoral vehicle for its candidates
before the PCB was legalized in 1985. Similarly, union leaders associated
NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 117
with the PCB focused on strengthening the party’s position within the
official union structure as their main strategy to promote the interests of
the working class, generally rejecting new unionism’s focus on political
autonomy. See Marco A. Santana, “Política e história em disputa: O
‘novo sindicalismo’ e a idéia da ruptura com o passado,” in O novo sindi-
calismo: Vinte anos depois, ed. Iram J. Rodrigues, (São Paulo: Vozes,
1999), 133–61; Santana, “Ditadura militar,” 284–7.
38. Vito Giannotti, História das lutas dos trabalhadores no Brasil (Rio de
Janeiro: Mauad, 2007), 237–9. Giannotti—himself a former metalworker
and author of various histories of the Brazilian labour movement—dis-
cusses how in 1980 a PCB representative tried to stop a metalworkers’
strike, arguing that the political moment was not right.
39. The “socialist left” within the labour movement aligned with groups such
as the Union Oppositions, Alternativa Sindical Socialista (Socialist Union
Alternative) and Corrente Sindical Classista (Classist Union Current).
The Union Oppositions sometimes accused the Authentics that their
strategies for union reform were not radical enough, undermining grass-
roots mobilizing and allowing corporatism to continue to exist, see
Leôncio Martins Rodrigues, CUT: Os militantes e a ideologia (São Paulo:
Paz e Terra, 1990), 20; Ricardo Antunes, O continente do labor (São
Paulo: Boitempo, 2011), 102–3. In the eyes of most radical groupings
that emerged in the wake of the strike movement, the union movement
did not merely function politically to improve of the position of workers
but as a revolutionary instrument in the struggle for socialism, Iram
J. Rodrigues, Sindicalismo e política: A trajetória da CUT (São Paulo:
Edições Sociais, 1997), 201.
40. The 1979 documentary “Braços cruzados, máquinas paradas” (“Arms
Crossed, Machines Stopped”, by Sergio Toledo Segall) depicts the strike
movement in Greater São Paulo in 1978 and 1979, including grassroots
mobilization outside the factory gates and union elections in which the
oposições sindicais challenged the official leadership.
41. For further analysis of the emergence of the Oposição Sindical Metalúrgica
de São Paulo in the 1960s and 1970s, its political and labour agenda, see
Rodrigues, Sindicalismo e política, 54–64; Rodrigues, “As tendências
políticas”, 24–5.
42. Giannotti, História das lutas, 238.
43. The military regime introduced a new strike law in 1964 which “virtually
eliminated the possibility of conducting a legal strike”. The law banned
strikes in the public sector, state-owned companies, and essential services
while the law stipulated organizational requirements which made a legal
decision to go on strike all but impossible. Sanctions for breaking the law
were also severe, including interventions in union affairs and other forms
118 M. RIETHOF
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NEW UNIONISM: PROTEST, MOBILIZATION, AND NEGOTIATING… 127
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
Total Public Sector Private Sector
the terms of the reforms with trade unions and employers’ organizations.
In exchange for union support the government promised to promote
wage bargaining without state interference, a long-standing demand of
the new unionists. The agreement also included profit-related pay, a pub-
lic utility rate freeze, and a suspension of plans to dismiss 20% of the coun-
try’s civil servants. Although the union leadership had initially decided to
participate in the social pact negotiations, the radical factions pressurized
the leadership into abandoning the talks, arguing that participating in the
negotiations meant “giving in” to the government.10 Fortified by a num-
ber of successful national and regional strikes in the transport, oil, and
banking sectors in 1990, the CUT decided instead to focus on demanding
direct negotiations with employers to guarantee employment stability and
compensation for hyperinflation.11 In 1992 the metalworkers in Greater
São Paulo negotiated an agreement with the employers’ organization
FIESP (Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo, Federation of
Industries of the State of São Paulo) to maintain employment levels. CUT
leader Vicente Paulo da Silva (“Vicentinho”) viewed this as an example of
how “creating a dialogue with other sectors of society” was a better way
to represent workers’ interests but critics believed that the employers had
offered few real concessions.12 At the same time, these negotiations
continued to raise questions about the extent to which the union move-
ment should participate in negotiations with the government without
betraying labour’s anti-statist principles; arguments which came to a head
at the CUT’s fourth national congress in 1991.
The CUT’s national congress (also known as CONCUT) took place in
the context of declining mobilization and Collor’s attempts to establish a
social pact in support of his reforms. The delegates held many debates on
whether activists should provoke a political crisis through strikes and dem-
onstrations to disrupt the regime or whether unionists should participate
proactively in the promotion of economic growth and development while
promoting workers’ participation in the political process. The majority
group in the CUT, Articulação, justified its support for negotiations by
pointing out that union representatives had contributed to modifications
of government policies, arguing that “the CUT’s participation in the
forum had been a decisive obstacle to the government’s … anti-popular
project”.13 From the critics’ point of view, the experience of privatization in
the late 1980s and early 1990s showed that union participation could lead
to corruption and inefficiency. “Rather than real democratization,” partici-
pation functioned as a fig leaf for the government instead of positioning
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 135
political fragmentation of the early 1990s raised questions about the extent
to which the new unionist movement might overcome the limitations of
traditional trade unionism. With hindsight, according to Rafael Freire
Neto, the CUT’s secretary of o rganization between 2000 and 2003, “[t]
he third CONCUT [in 1988] … marked a profound change in the CUT’s
trajectory. A restrictive vision of the union central prevailed, representing
only part of the working class, the unionized, leaving to future generations
the task of organizing the unemployed, the informal workers, recovering
[the CUT’s] mission to represent the entire working class”.34
Although these concerns translated into the emergence of a broader
conception of “class” within both the CUT and the PT—encompassing
informal-sector workers, rural workers, white-collar workers, and in some
cases, micro-entrepreneurs35—the union structures continued to reflect a
narrow constituency. For example, while in 1988 the majority of delegates
represented rural unions, followed by education and services,36 by the
fourth CONCUT in 1991, rural union delegates had become a marginal
presence, making up 12.3% of the delegates while the industrial sector
represented 33.4%, with close to half of the delegates from the services
sector. From the late 1980s onwards, the number of delegates from the
services sector increased from 35.7% in 1988 to 59% in 1997, while the
participation of rural workers decreased by one-third between 1991 and
1997.37 These changes reflected the internal balance of power as well as
demographic shifts, and they also opened up space for other organizations
to emerge, such as the MST and the moderate union central Força Sindical
(Union Force, FS).
Whereas the position of rural workers within the CUT declined between
the 1980s and the 1990s, the MST strengthened their political role in
Brazil as rural mobilizations and land occupations placed the issue of land
reform on the national agenda. The CUT, the PT, and the MST were
closely connected during this period, both in organizational and political
terms, and “largely shaped by interpersonal linkages among its leaders”.38
As was the case for the CUT, many MST activists were also active party
members, campaigning or even running for the PT.39 The MST also sup-
ported protests and mass mobilizations organized by other social move-
ments, such as protests against privatization and mass demonstrations
against government reform plans and the occupation of government
buildings. The MST’s militancy and occasional use of violence was contro-
versial among CUT and PT activists,40 who sometimes considered this
strategy as undermining more moderate forms of protest and negotiations
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 139
with the government.41 However, during the second half of the 1990s, the
MST became significantly more successful at organizing mass demonstra-
tions and marches than the CUT,42 underlining the argument that the
CUT had started to lose its mobilizational power.
On the other side of the political spectrum, a new central union orga-
nization began to challenge the CUT by accepting rather than opposing
Collor’s reforms, thereby positioning itself as a negotiating partner for the
government and championing moderate political strategies.43 The CUT’s
emphasis on mobilization and confrontation during the 1990s opened up
spaces for the emergence of a more pragmatic unionism, which was based
on the view among significant sectors of the union movement that work-
ers had interests in common with the government and employers in over-
coming the economic crisis.44 Founded in 1991, Força Sindical45 had a
pragmatic focus based on sindicalismo de resultados or “results unionism”.
Força Sindical grew quickly in terms of its political importance and the
number of unions affiliated to it, although its membership only covered a
narrow range of sectors and its connections with individual unions were
considered weak.46 Força Sindical intended to become the principal inter-
locutor of the government, a space left vacant by the CUT’s refusal to
participate in the 1991 negotiations. Contrary to the CUT, which contin-
ued to promote an ideological perspective on capital-labour relations
interpreted as class struggle, Força Sindical emphasized political compro-
mises. For instance, Força Sindical rejected new unionism’s focus on gen-
eral strikes to protest against government policies, working on the basis of
an interest convergence between capitalists and labour. According to
Força Sindical’s political programme, the new unionism model promoted
“a climate of permanent conflict between workers’ organizations and the
government … threatening its political credibility and ultimately contrib-
uting to the destabilization of democratic institutions”,47 reflecting the
fear that protests would provoke a return to authoritarianism. Although its
non-ideological nature supposedly distanced Força Sindical from political
parties, Antonio Rogerio Magri of Força Sindical was appointed Labour
Minister in the Collor government.48 Força Sindical also claimed to be
pro-capitalist, based on the idea that trade unions were part of the market
and should focus exclusively on wage levels and working conditions rather
than political goals.
Faced with competition from Força Sindical and its own internal divisions,
the CUT’s internal debates reflected on the negative effects of the economic
crisis on unions’ ability to mobilize workers, as confrontational strategies no
140 M. RIETHOF
longer had the same power they did in the 1980s. The organization’s debates
during the early and mid-1990s reflected the view that although the struggle
against the military regime had unified the opposition forces, this unity soon
dissolved when everyday trade union politics began to dominate the labour
agenda again. A 1992 CUT publication explained these limitations as caused
by the political restrictions the authoritarian regime had imposed on the
incoming civilian government alongside the continuing power of the corpo-
ratist union structure which limited effective political labour strategies.49
While this is certainly part of the story, the economic crisis and the union
movement’s own political divisions also affected the CUT’s mobilizational
power. Many unionists expressed their disillusionment with Brazilian democ-
racy in union publications, particularly what they saw as the lack of genuine
popular participation and social improvement, while also recognizing that
the new political conjuncture was affecting the union movement. Reflecting
on the early 1990s a CONCUT report from 1997 acknowledged that the
political context of labour opposition had changed: “with the end of the
dictatorship and re-democratization new social actors emerged and union
struggles no longer had the intrinsic democratic character associated with
confronting the military dictatorship.”50 Although these comments provide
an insight into the connections between political conjuncture and the dynam-
ics of labour conflicts, unionists struggled to translate this into an appropriate
political response as internal disagreements continued.
The internal conflicts clearly reflected the struggle to organize effective
campaigns as ideological conflicts and leadership elections overtook much-
needed debates about political strategies.51 The inward-looking conflicts
continued as competing leadership candidates accused each other of
incompetence and of sabotaging campaigns for their own benefit. Gilmar
Carneiro, of the powerful São Paulo bankworkers’ union and CUT
secretary-general, resigned in 1993, citing that the CUT was divided and
lacked agility in the face of a growing political crisis.52 A PT article agreed,
arguing that the CUT’s divisions had made effective political decision-
making all but impossible, while also pointing out that the CUT’s prob-
lems were not all that different from the much-criticized faults of the
official unions and Força Sindical:
After years of failed economic reform plans, the 1994 Plano Real finally
achieved what no other stabilization plan had managed to do before,
decreasing inflation from four digits to one. Despite the positive effects of
the end of hyperinflation on living standards, the Plan’s aftermath created
142 M. RIETHOF
resist the proposals for flexibilization of labour rights and the deregulation
of the labour relations system”.63 Vicentinho’s observation not only
described the problems that even the strongest unions faced but also
marked the general trend that pushed many unions into a defensive stance
as the struggles at a local level mirrored the difficulties for trade
unions attempting to assume a leading position in mass protests against
government policy.
Unsurprisingly, given the implications for the CUT’s core supporters,
the union organization strongly criticized the Plano Real, arguing that
rather than producing development the reforms would lead to Brazil’s
“subordinate insertion into the globalized economy, with a devastating
impact on … public investment and accelerating the dis-organization of
the productive structure”.64 The CUT also disputed the actual positive
results of the plan, as seen in its 1997 analysis of the effects of the Real
Plan.65 The pamphlet listed many issues that had not improved during this
period: economic growth was not as high as it could be and had not trick-
led down evenly66; the plan had not reduced the use of imported compo-
nents in industrial products67; and finally, the reforms had increased
unemployment and informal work.68 Despite these criticisms, the union
organization found it hard to disagree with the immediate effects of the
Plano Real on inflation, illustrating the demobilizing effect of the Plan.
The benefits to the general population could outweigh the localized losses
in sectors such as the automobile industry: “the losses resulting from the
economic reforms in specific sectors of the economy … appear to be a
lesser threat to living standards than high inflation so the rapid price reduc-
tions produce a large number of beneficiaries in the short term.”69 Lower
inflation generally had a positive effect on workers, reducing financial
uncertainty, particularly for the many Brazilians without access to a bank
account. On this basis, it would be somewhat irrational for the CUT to
criticize the effects of the Plano Real on hyperinflation, a dilemma that
also affected labour militancy.
The economic stability and rising unemployment levels that the Plano
Real brought in its wake combined with the rather uncompromising atti-
tude of the Cardoso government affected the union movement’s ability to
mobilize workers. Paradoxically, while rising unemployment in the after-
math of the Plano Real challenged unions’ mobilizational capacity, the
end of hyperinflation also undermined new unionist strategies in the eyes
of CUT representative. For the CUT, the end of hyperinflation forced
trade unions to focus on issues beyond adjusting wage levels to inflation,
144 M. RIETHOF
which had been a highly effective strategy in the late 1970s and early
1980s. As a CUT document from 1997 observed: the “drastic reduction
of inflation had dislocated the union movement’s agenda. During the long
years of high inflation, we concentrated on the defence of wages and pur-
chasing power but we did not prioritize other themes on the agenda. …
National and union agendas became more complex … posing new chal-
lenges for trade unions”.70 Other figures in the union movement also
acknowledged that it had become more difficult to mobilize workers, par-
ticularly given the threat of unemployment. Lula stated during a meeting
celebrating the twentieth anniversary of CONCLAT (the first and last
congress attended by all Brazilian trade unions) in 2001 that while a car
equipped with a loudspeaker (carro de som) used to be sufficient to call
workers to a strike, the current political and economic context no longer
worked that way.71 In an interview, Fernando Lopes of the Confederação
Nacional dos Metalúrgicos (National Confederation of Metalworkers—
CNM) pointed to the psychological effects of what we could call the
“mobilization/inflation paradox”. Lopes argued that during hyperinfla-
tion, it was easier to demand a high wage increase as this provided a direct
incentive to workers: they expected that they could regain the wages that
they lost during a strike through the increase achieved if the strike was
successful. With low inflation, the percentage of wage demands was lower
than in times of hyperinflation, having a negative psychological effect on
the willingness to strike, even though the effects on their purchasing
power were the same.72 Thereby, while the Plano Real’s implications ini-
tially sparked strikes, the paradoxical effect of the end of hyperinflation
coinciding with company restructuring strategies such as outsourcing and
job cuts pushed unions towards negotiating strategies.
The threat of unemployment associated with outsourcing and the relo-
cation of factories also undermined workers’ willingness and ability to
engage in militant action. In a prominent illustration of the shift from mili-
tant action to a defensive position, unions in the automobile sector focused
increasingly on job security in exchange for flexible working hours and
wages73 as employees faced compulsory redundancies and plant closures.74
For instance, Volkswagen threatened to fire one-third of its workforce in
1997 but introduced a voluntary redundancy programme under union
pressure.75 The CUT’s approach towards these initiatives was ambiguous,
rejecting them as deregulation and questioning whether such outcomes
would create jobs.76 Accepting the new reality was a difficult step to take for
many unionists, leading to internal disagreements as the radical tendencies
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 145
members from buying shares.128 The local unions often considered job
security for workers post-privatization—which was negotiated in the case
of some electricity companies in the state of São Paulo—and preferential
shares for employees as positive gains in the privatization process.
Nevertheless, the national CUT continued to interpret these types of
negotiations as conceding to the government’s privatization efforts in its
political statements.
The federal government also recognized that the participation of work-
ers as shareholders in the process could be a valuable instrument when
dealing with opposition forces. In the case of the steel company Usiminas,
10% of the shares were offered to Usiminas employees at a reduced price.
As a result, unions and employees became involved in setting up investment
clubs (which were promoted by the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Econômico e Social [BNDES], National Economic and Social Development
Bank), negotiating their participation in the privatization process directly
with the BNDES and the company’s management. In addition, these shares
guaranteed employees a seat on the administrative council of the privatized
enterprise.129 The CVRD unions proposed a social agreement (Acordo
Social), the result of a visit to privatized companies in several European
countries.130 The document stressed the importance of the agreement for
an increase in productivity with participation and consultation of all
employees (“a partnership between labour and capital”).131 The document
supported the acquisition of shares by CVRD employees, also noting that
new management techniques could facilitate employee participation in the
administrative council of the company, as in the European experience the
unionists had encountered.132 This strategy was only successful in achieving
a 10% offer of preferred shares to the employees but proved impossible to
negotiate in terms of the other aspects of the proposal. The experiences of
the CVRD unions with participation through shareholding were therefore
not wholly positive, as the investor’s club that was established in order to
take full advantage of the employee offer did not want to be associated with
the union, representing the position of workers as shareholders instead.133
A similar initiative took place in CSN in 1990: a document published by the
Sindicato dos Engenheiros stressed that the CSN as a state-owned enter-
prise should be democratized, which would include core union demands,
such as the right to information for trade unions, union representation in
the workplace, participation of unions in the formulation of new company
policies, and fair hiring procedures for new workers.134 However, the reality
was that these a mbitions did not resonate in the privatization debate, leav-
ing individual unions weakened and the national union movement divided.
154 M. RIETHOF
5.5 Conclusion
To deal with the challenge of effective labour strategies in an increasingly
adverse political and economic situation during the second half of the
1990s, the CUT proposed in 1997 to widen its political strategies to
“resist attacks against workers’ rights, elaborate alternative proposals and
construct alliances to resist neo-liberalism”, signalling a desire to return to
the union movement’s past militancy.135 The wish to widen popular resis-
tance against government policies beyond unions through alliances with
other social movements136 partly reflected the union movement’s own
dilemmas between militant and moderate action, and partly the impressive
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 155
Notes
1. Wendy Hunter, The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, 1989–
2009 Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109–116.
2. Ronald M. Schneider, Brazil: Culture and Politics in a New Industrial
Powerhouse (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 111.
3. CUT, “Resolução da reunião extraordinária da executiva da Direção
Nacional da CUT realizada no dia 16/3, em São Paulo”, InformaCUT,
55, 20–27 March (1989), 1–2; Vito Giannotti, História das lutas dos tra-
balhadores no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2007), 262.
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 157
14. “A CUT mostra a cara,” Brasil Agora 10 (March 1992), 4; CUT São
Paulo/Escola Sindical São Paulo, “Sindicalismo CUT—20 anos,”
Cadernos de Formação, no. 1 (2001–2002), 76–7. Another negotiation
attempt happened when the CUT unsuccessfully tried to convince the
Itamar Franco government to introduce a full monthly adjustment of
wages to inflation in 1993. See “A CUT mostra: é falsa a desculpa do din-
heiro” and “A negociação vista no raio X,” De Fato 1 (1) (1993), 4–11.
15. Giannotti, História das lutas, 279.
16. For example, an article in the magazine Causa Operária (published by a
left-wing group within the CUT of the same name) argued that the
absence of the ABC Metalworkers’ union from the 1991 general strike
signalled that the CUT’s moderate majority had distanced itself from
militant action, “Greve geral: Primeiro balanço,” Causa Operária 131
(May 30, 1991), reproduced in CPV, Quinzena 118 (June 1991), 10–11.
17. CUT, Resoluções do 4o CONCUT.
18. Although no further national negotiations on wage and price levels
occurred, the government increased the representation of trade unions
and employers’ organizations in social security institutions, signalling the
integration of union representatives in parts of the state apparatus.
Organized labour also gained a representative on the Administrative
Council of the BNDES. See Maurício Rands Barros, Labour Relations
and the New Unionism in Contemporary Brazil (New York: St. Martin’s
Press; London: Macmillan, 1999), 47 and Marcio Pochmann et al.,
“Ação sindical no Brasil: Transformações e perspectivas,” São Paulo em
Perspectiva 12 (1) (1998), 10–23.
19. PT, “O fundo do poço,” Boletim Nacional 59, October 1991, 8. Jornal
do Brasil, “CUT briga na quarta eleição de Meneguelli,” September 9,
1991; Jornal da Tarde, “Guerra entre tendências tumultua o congresso
da CUT,” September 7, 1991.
20. PT, “O PT e o momento político: resolução do Diretório Nacional
reunido em 16/03/91,” Boletim Nacional, April (1990), 5.
21. Gazeta Mercantil, “Greve inexpressiva poderá levar sindicatos ao
Congresso,” May 24, 1991; Folha de São Paulo, “Meneguelli atribui fra-
casso à ‘falta de empenho’,” May 24, 1991.
22. Another major conflict focused on whether the CUT should affiliate with
the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which
critics associated with a moderate political agenda and Cold-War labour
politics. Interview Kjeld A. Jakobsen, August 20, 2001; CUT, A política
internacional da CUT: História e perspectivas (São Paulo: CUT, 2003),
47–9; Hermes A. Costa, “A política internacional da CGTP e da CUT:
Etapas, temas e desafios,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 71 (2005):
152–3. Gazeta Mercantil, “Divergências políticas dificultam os debates
em congresso da CUT,” September 6, 1991.
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 159
23. Echoing the debates in the new unionist movement, Ann Mische argues
that the Brazilian student movement experienced “a period of internal
evaluation and restructuring” during the same period, reflecting “grow-
ing dissatisfaction with the factional entrenchment of the movement”,
which stifled the movement’s creativity and effectiveness in the late
1980s. See Ann Mische, Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention
across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), 141–3.
24. Diário Popular, “CUT deve reeleger hoje Jair Meneguelli,” Diário
Popular, September 8, 1991.
25. To strengthen the ties between the CUT and the unions, from 1991
onwards unions had to be formally affiliated to the CUT to participate in
national decision-making and the number of delegates each union could
send would be based on the number of unionized workers affiliated with
the CUT, effectively favouring the larger unions. See CUT, Resoluções do
4o CONCUT, 2; Sílvio Costa, Tendências e centrais sindicais: O movi-
mento sindical brasileiro, 1978–1994 (São Paulo: Editora Anita Garibaldi,
1995), 156–7; Alvaro A. Comin, “A estrutura sindical corporativa: Um
obstáculo à consolidação das centrais sindicais no Brasil,” (MA diss.,
Universidade de São Paulo, 1995), 84.
26. Just as the metalworkers’ union pioneered factory commissions during
the 1980s, its representatives also began negotiating with employers at a
company and regional level through sectoral chambers (câmaras setori-
ais). Their remit was to define policies to compensate for the negative
effects of economic liberalization on the export sector, particularly in the
automobile industry in São Paulo. The unions and employers agreed to
reduce car prices by 22% and to involve workers in the restructuring pro-
cess, which ended up maintaining employment levels and wage adjust-
ments fully linked to monthly inflation. The chambers disappeared in
1994, when sector-specific policies became increasingly discredited within
the government. See Departamento de Estudos Sócio-Econômicos e
Políticos (DESEP/CUT), “Câmaras setoriais e intervenção sindical,”
Texto para Discussão 5 (São Paulo: DESEP/CUT, 1992); DESEP/
CUT, “Câmaras setoriais: Para além do complexo automotivo,” Texto
para Discussão 6 (São Paulo: DESEP/CUT, 1993); França, Novo sindi-
calismo, loc. 595–853; Scott B. Martin, (1997) “Beyond Corporatism:
New Patterns of Representation in the Brazilian Auto Industry,” in The
New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and
Representation, ed. Douglas A. Chalmers et al. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 45–71.
27. Sindicato dos Bancários de São Paulo, SBSP.
28. Associação de Professores de Ensino Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, or
APEOESP.
160 M. RIETHOF
29. Despite their relative marginalization in the CUT, rural workers became
an increasingly visible and active group in the Brazilian union movement
in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, in 1998 the percentage of rural
unionization was 24.4%, higher than in any other sector. Although the
rural workers’ movement was relatively strong, their participation in the
CUT congresses decreased from the early 1990s. Rural unionists enjoyed
representation proportional to their organizational strength in 1988
but their participation declined during subsequent CONCUTs. In the
early 1990s, the rural union confederation Confederação Nacional dos
Trabalhadores na Agricultura (CONTAG) began discussing affiliation to
the CUT, which many in the CUT saw as an effort to strengthen its roots
in the countryside, although some also found CONTAG conservative,
see PT, “CUT e Contag no mesmo barco,” Boletim Nacional 5 (December
1991), 3; PT, “CUT discute Contag,” Boletim Nacional 42 (July 1993),
11. On the representation of rural unionists within the CONCUT, see
Leôncio Martins Rodrigues et al., Retrato da CUT: Delegados do 3o
CONCUT, representação nas categorias (São Paulo: CUT, undated), 22,
27; CUT, Resoluções e Registros, 6o Congresso Nacional da CUT, August
1997, 128.
30. Rodrigues, Sindicalismo e política, 185.
31. For example, between the early and mid-1990s the powerful bankers’
unions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were almost equally divided
between the majority coalition led by Articulação Sindical and opposition
groups which favoured confrontation over negotiation. See Folha de São
Paulo, “CUT vai dividida à eleição dos bancários,” Folha de São Paulo,
January 17, 1994; CUT São Paulo, “Sindicalismo CUT,” 78–9; Estado
de São Paulo, “A CUT sofre com luta interna,”, O Estado de São Paulo,
June 2, 1991.
32. Sluyter-Beltrão, Rise and Decline, 280.
33. See also Heloísa de Souza Martins and Iram J. Rodrigues, “O sindical-
ismo brasileiro na segunda metade dos anos 90,” Tempo Social 11 (2)
(1999): 156; Rodrigues, Sindicalismo e política, 215.
34. Cited in CUT São Paulo, “Sindicalismo CUT,” 9–10.
35. Riethof, “Changing Strategies,” 33–5.
36. Rodrigues et al., Retrato da CUT, 22, 27.
37. Further information about CONCUT delegates in 1988, 1991 and 1997
can be found in Rodrigues et al., Retrato da CUT; Rodrigues, Sindicalismo
e política, 213; Costa, Tendências e centrais, 160; and CUT, Resoluções e
registros, 128.
38. Hernan B. Gómez, Lula, the Workers’ Party and the Governability
Dilemma in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 2013), 36.
39. Paradoxically given the MST’s emphasis on autonomy, it received finan-
cial resources from the state to administer several rural social programmes
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 161
during the 1990s, as Gómez argues. Although the MST also organized
major anti-governments protests, its organizational survival began to
depend on state funding, presaging the increasingly close relations
between the PT government and the MST from 2003 onwards, see
Gómez, Lula, the Workers’ Party, 46.
40. See footnote 89 on MST involvement in violent protests against the
privatization of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce.
41. Gómez, Lula, the Workers’ Party, 49–50; Gabriel Ondetti, Land, Protest,
and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform
in Brazil (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008), 126–7, 162–3.
42. Salvador Sandoval, “Working-Class Contention,” in Reforming Brazil,
ed. Mauricio Font and Anthony P. Spanakos (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2008), 208–10.
43. On Força Sindical’s roots in São Paulo’s moderate metalworkers’ union,
see Mark Anner. Solidarity Transformed: Labor Responses to Globalization
and Crisis in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011),
141–3.
44. Cardoso, Trama da modernidade, 68.
45. The central union organization Força Sindical and “pragmatic” unionism
have not been studied as widely as the CUT and new unionism. The
principal studies on Força Sindical’s political role in the 1990s are Leôncio
Martins Rodrigues and Adalberto Moreira Cardoso, Força Sindical: Uma
análise socio-política (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1993) and Cardoso, Trama
da modernidade; see also Costa, Tendências e centrais and Barros, Labour
Relations.
46. Barros, Labour Relations, 42.
47. Força Sindical, Um projeto para o Brasil: A proposta da Força Sindical
(São Paulo: Geração Editora, 1993): 106.
48. Barros, Labour Relations, 36–9; Cardoso, Trama da modernidade, 36,
47–50. In 2002 Força Sindical’s president Paulo Pereira da Silva
(“Paulinho da Força) ran as a vice-presidential candidate of Lula’s main
competitor Ciro Gomes and in 2015 became involved as federal deputy
in protecting Congress speaker Eduardo Cunha from prosecution for
corruption as part of “Cunha’s shock troops”. See Globo, “‘Tropa de
choque’ de Cunha reúne deputados de cinco partidos,” Globo, Dec. 6,
2015.
49. DESEP/CUT, Câmaras setoriais, 7.
50. CUT, Resoluções e Registros, 19.
51. For example, see PT, “CUT: Balança mas não cai,” Boletim Nacional 70
(June 1993), 12.
52. Carneiro cited in PT, “Chacoalhada na roseira,” Boletim Nacional 39
(May 1993), 11.
162 M. RIETHOF
53. PT, “Uma crise a resolver,” Boletim Nacional 40 (June 1993), 12.
54. Another heated debate focused on whether the CUT should formally
support and finance Lula’s 1994 presidential election campaign, vehe-
mently opposed by the minority groups, which often belonged to other
political parties. Although these groups lost the vote on other radical
proposals, they did manage to block this proposal during the fifth
CONCUT in 1994, see Folha de São Paulo, “CUT decide não dar apoio
formal a Lula,” Folha de São Paulo, May 23, 1994.
55. Durval de Carvalho quoted in Gustavo Codas, “Pancadaria nunca mais,”
Boletim Nacional 57 (April 1994), 10.
56. Mische, Partisan Publics, 134–5.
57. Renato Baumann, “O Brasil nos anos 1990: Uma economia em tran-
sição,” In Brasil: Uma Década em Transição, ed. Renato Baumann (Rio
de Janeiro: Editora Campus/CEPAL, 2000), 21–3.
58. See Sandoval’s detailed discussion on how the reforms affected employ-
ment prospects for metalworkers as well as workers in the public and
banking sectors and the privatized steel industry, where unions were tra-
ditionally strong: Sandoval, “Working-Class Contention”, 200–7.
59. Sandoval, “Working-Class Contention,” 200.
60. Baumann, “Brasil nos anos 1990”, 34–5; International Labour
Organization, Panorama Laboral 1999 (Lima: ILO, 1999).
61. Moreover, privatization affected not only workers and individual trade
unions in state-owned companies but also divided the union movement
as a whole, as analysed in the next section. Gazeta Mercantil, “Mais peso
do funcionalismo dentro da CUT,” Gazeta Mercantil, May 20, 1994;
Rubens Penha Cysne, “Aspectos macro e microeconômicos das refor-
mas,” in Brasil: Uma década em transição, ed. Renato Baumann (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Campus/CEPAL, 2000), 57, 72–3.
62. DIEESE, “A reestruturação negociada na indústria automobilística
brasileira,” Boletim DIEESE 168 (1995), 18–19.
63. Martins and Rodrigues, “Sindicalismo brasileiro,” 159–60.
64. CUT, Resoluções e Registros, 16–7.
65. Vicente Paulo da Silva, 1° de Julho ou 1° de Abril? (n.d.), http://www.
cut.org.br/a20104.htm. ‘July 1’ in the title refers to the date of the intro-
duction of the Plano Real in 1994, while ‘April 1’ refers to April Fool’s
day.
66. During a time before the “Asian model” was discredited, Vicente Paulo
da Silva criticized attempts of the Brazilian government to replicate this
model by comparing the “Brazilian cat” with the “Asian tigers”.
67. Folha da Tarde, “Metalúrgicos do ABC protestam contra importação de
autopeças,” Folha da Tarde, August 3, 1995.
68. DESEP/CUT, “Os gastos sociais no governo FHC” (São Paulo:
DESEP/CUT, 1997).
ECONOMIC CRISIS, REFORM, AND THE PRAGMATIC LEFT, 1989–2001 163
69. Pamela K. Starr and Philip Oxhorn, “Introduction: The Ambiguous Link
Between Economic and Political Reform,” in Markets and Democracy in
Latin America: Conflict or Convergence?, ed. Pamela K. Starr and Philip
Oxhorn, 1–9. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner) 1999), fn 1.
70. CUT, Resoluções e Registros, 19.
71. Author’s notes, speech Luís Ínacio Lula da Silva, at “Vinte Anos da pri-
meira CONCLAT”, São Paulo, August 23, 2001; Interview with Julio
Turra, Secretaria de Relações Internacionais (CUT), São Paulo, August
21, 2001.
72. Interview Fernando Lopes, Executive director, Confederação Nacional
dos Metalúrgicos (CNM-CUT), São Paulo, August 22, 2001.
73. The Banco de Horas allowed employers to vary the number of hours
worked according to production requirements rather than cutting jobs to
respond to changing demand. Participação nos Lucros e Resultados
(PLR) allowed unions and employers to negotiate profit- and perfor-
mance-related pay. Carlos E. Freitas, “Alterações na regulamentação das
relações de trabalho no governo Fernando Henrique,” in Precarização e
leis do trabalho nos anos FHC (São Paulo: CUT/ Secretaria da Política
Sindical, 2001): 11–2.
74. These negotiations represented a typical example of the transformation of
labour relations in Brazil: originating in local practices where these negotia-
tions were already common place and resulting in federal legislation in 1998.
75. In November 2001, Volkswagen workers in São Bernardo do Campo
accepted a 15% wage cut and reduction in working hours in return for
employment protection and proper redundancy schemes. Martins and
Rodrigues, “Sindicalismo brasileiro”, 176; Raymond Colitt, “Brazil
unions adapt to changing times,” Financial Times, November 22, 2001;
Raymond Colitt, “Brazilian workers approve VW pay-cut agreement,”
Financial Times November 21, 2001.
76. CUT/Secretaria de Política Sindical, A estratégia da CUT em relação ao
Banco de Horas (São Paulo: Secretaria de Política Sindical/CUT, 1998),
2–3.
77. Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC, Participação nos lucros e resultados:
A visão dos metalúrgicos do ABC (São Bernardo do Campo: Sindicato dos
Metalúrgicos do ABC, 1998), 12.
78. Direct negotiations between employers and employees on issues such as
shorter working weeks, temporary dismissal, and a-typical labour con-
tracts (e.g., temporary and part-time contracts) became common in the
1990s, see Maria S. Portella de Castro, “Mercosul e Relaçoes Trabalhistas,”
Informe OIT, February 1999, mimeo, 39; Maria S. Portella de Castro,
Estratégias sindicales frente a los procesos de globalización e integración
regional: Un análisis comparado TLCAN-Mercosur, 1999, mimeo, 39;
Martins and Rodrigues, “Sindicalismo brasileiro”, 167–70. The federal
164 M. RIETHOF
Velasco Jr., A economia política das políticas públicas: Fatores que favorece-
ram as privatizações no período 1985/94, Texto para Discussão 54 (Rio de
Janeiro: BNDES, 1997): 20.
86. Within the public sector opposition to privatization could be found
among staff of state-owned enterprises, politicians connected to the pub-
lic sector, in contrast with governmental institutions committed to priva-
tization, such as the BNDES, see Velasco, Economia política, 20; Werner
Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development (Westport, CN:
Praeger, 1995), 261–2; Luigi Manzetti, Privatization South American
Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 54–5.
87. A participant from the Brazilian northeast at the trade union-organized
Third Regional Energy Conference (Rio de Janeiro, September 2001)
commented to me that privatization was slow to develop in the northeast
due to clientelism and corruption as local politicians often had a stake in
state-owned enterprises and distributed jobs in exchange for votes and
political favours. See also, Globo, “Trevisan denuncia pressões contra a
desestatização,” Globo, April 13, 1986; Gazeta Mercantil, “Congresso
ameaça privatização,” Gazeta Mercantil, March 14, 1990.
88. For example, in the case of the steel company Cosipa in the state of São
Paulo, the municipal government supported union protests against mass
dismissals in the run-up to privatization, see PT, “Cosipa: Demissões sus-
pensas,” Boletim Nacional 79 (December 1993), 3. On the similar case of
CSN, see Edilson J. Graciolli, “Um laboratorio chamada CSN: Greves,
privatização e sindicalismo (A trajetoria do Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos de
Volta Redonda - 1989/1993),” (PhD thesis, Universidade Estadual de
Campinas, 1999), 224. A related argument was that state-owned compa-
nies funded social and cultural projects. For example, CVRD had to place
8% of its annual turnover in a social fund, which financed schools, envi-
ronmental projects, and trade union services. Post-privatization, the new
owners only have to pay for projects that had already been approved.
Interview with Marcelo Sereno, December 17, 1999; Centro de Pesquisa
Vergueiro (CPV), “Muito além da Vale,” in CVRD: Privatização da Vale
do Rio Doce (São Paulo: CPV 1997).
89. The CVRD owned significant amounts of land in the Amazon region,
provoking protests among rubber tappers and the MST against the com-
pany’s privatization and the potential sale of these lands. An example of
violent protests against the privatization of CVRD was the destruction of
a CVRD-owned port in the state of Espírito Santo in December 1998.
Other examples of protest included road blocks, occupations, demonstra-
tions at privatization auctions, and hunger strikes, see Folha de São Paulo,
“Bloqueio causa prejuízo de R$ 5 mil à Vale,” Folha de São Paulo, July 10,
1996; Folha de São Paulo, “Exército pode retirar garimpeiros no PA,”
Folha de São Paulo, Oct. 21, 1996; Folha de São Paulo, “Termina greve
de fome na Vale,” Folha de São Paulo, Dec. 2, 1997; Folha de São Paulo,
166 M. RIETHOF
98. Interview with Luiz Vieira and Celso Vianna de Fonseca, September 15,
2001; author’s notes during visit to Cosipa trade union office and inter-
view with trade union official, Cubatão, April 20, 1999.
99. Tribunal Superior de Trabalho, or TST.
100. Martins and Rodrigues, “Sindicalismo brasileiro,” 157–8.
101. Diário do Grande ABC, “Metalúrgicos da região param em solidariedade
a petroleiros,” Diário do Grande ABC, May 20, 1995.
102. Many public-sector strikes in 1995 focused on privatization and employ-
ment after the job losses of the early 1990s, including in the electricity
sector, education, and telecommunications, see DIEESE, “As greves de
maio de 1995,” Boletim DIEESE 171, June (1995), 53.
103. Cited in Petrobras, União e força: Memória das organizações dos trabalha-
dores da Petrobras, 1954–2009 (Rio de Janeiro: Petrobras, 2009), 19.
104. Folha de São Paulo, “Operação foi determinada por FHC na 2a,” Folha
de São Paulo, May 25, 1995.
105. Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, 199.
106. Interview with Argemiro Pertence Neto, Secretario de Comunicação,
Associação de Engenheiros da Petrobrás (AEPET), Rio de Janeiro,
September 6, 2001; Interview with Julio Turra, Diretor Executivo
(Secretaria de Relações Internacionais), CUT, São Paulo, August 21,
2001.
107. See Federação Única dos Petroleiros (FUP), “Carta Aberta á População
Brasileira,” Rio de Janeiro: FUP, September 1995; Assessorias de
Imprensa dos Sindicatos de Petroleiros do Estado de São Paulo,
“Defender o monopólio do petróleo: Um desafio para a imprensa sindi-
cal,” São Paulo: Sindicatos de Petroleiros do Estado de São Paulo, 1995.
108. The reaction of the press and the Brazilian government to the Petrobras
strike illustrates the image of public-sector workers as benefiting from
state protection, see Estado de São Paulo, “Os perigos da greve,” O
Estado de São Paulo, Oct. 3, 1995. In clear support of the government,
the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo argued in an article entitled “FHC
knocks out the left in one year” that “this type of unionism, which lives
off the monopolies inherited from an obsolete state and which confuses
its corporatist interests with the defence of the national interest, is … one
of the pillars of our backwardness”, see Estado de São Paulo, “FHC
nocauteia esquerdas em um ano,” O Estado de São Paulo, Nov., 6, 1995.
An article in Veja suggested a convergence of interests between the CUT,
public-sector management and public-sector unions, with the latter ben-
efiting from Brazil’s economic and political crisis: “As defenders of a
strong state, the leaders of these [public-sector unions] only managed to
enlarge their union basis among public workers in the last ten years
because they faced a state in crisis,” see Veja, “A nova cara do ABC,” Veja,
May 25, 1994, 44.
168 M. RIETHOF
141. For example, see Hunter’s argument about the relationship between the
PT’s experience in local government and political pragmatism, Hunter,
Transformation of the Workers’ Party, Ch. 4. See also Gómez, Lula, the
Workers’ Party, Ch. 5 about the changing relationship between the PT
and civil society in the 1990s; and Samuels, “Socialism to Social
Democracy,” about internal changes.
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176 M. RIETHOF
While Brazilian unions had struggled with the effect of economic crisis
and ever-tightening macroeconomic reforms during the 1990s, the presi-
dential election campaigns in 2002 provided unionists with new prospects
for political change. However, after Lula’s breakthrough election victory,
the PT’s emphasis on radical social transformation during the 1980s made
way for a more pragmatic agenda, including the maintenance of the previ-
ous government’s economic policies, supported by a new programme of
social policies aimed at poverty reduction. In this new political environ-
ment, significant sections of the union movement benefitted from
increased access to political influence as unions moved closer to the gov-
ernment agenda and several senior trade unionists took up ministerial
posts, thereby absorbing the party’s electoral and governmental logic. Yet
the new union-party relations with the PT in power proved controversial
as new unionism’s close ties with the party sparked significant conflicts in
terms of pursuing either radical or gradualist strategies. By examining
these conflicts during the PT-led governments (2003–2016), this chapter
moves away from the emphasis on political moderation evident in much of
the literature.1 Instead, the argument proposed here is that while the drive
towards moderation was strong during this period, disagreements about
political agendas and strategies as well as changing economic conjunctures
sparked not only divisions but also a new wave of labour militancy from
2009 onwards.
The political dynamics of the early years after Lula became president in
2003 illustrate how trade union debates about militant and moderate
political strategies evolved in a new political context. Labour’s political
dilemmas mirrored what happened in the PT in this period, which meant
that unions were reluctant to force the government to introduce far-
reaching progressive reforms. The unions’ close relationship with the PT
played a major role in moderating the labour agenda, particularly given the
unions’ hesitance to challenge the government’s policy choices from 2003
onwards. As several key union figures entered the government as ministers
and politicians under Lula, the CUT’s leadership became closer politically
to the PT’s agenda in power. In addition, union leaders were involved in
running Brazil’s powerful state-owned enterprises, pension, and invest-
ment funds. The integration of the new unionists in the PT-led govern-
ments has led authors such as Francisco de Oliveira, Alvaro Bianchi, and
Ruy Braga to conclude that the cutista unionists formed a new political
class under the working-class president, which in their view meant that the
transformation of new unionism into a moderate force was irreversible.2
The relationship between the PT and its social movement supporters
changed as the party offered channels of political influence but the
party also became less responsive to more radical social movement
demands, lessening the effectiveness of civil society participation. Similarly,
opportunities for union participation in major policy debates, such as
labour reforms, contributed to a more gradualist approach, as union lead-
ers struggled to reconcile access to political influence and effective opposi-
tion. Nevertheless, even if the government consulted civil society
representatives regarding major policy reforms, the proposals proved
highly controversial, bringing up debates and disagreements which had
180 M. RIETHOF
divided the unions since the late 1970s. As discussed in this section, the
internal debate became increasingly fractious, resulting in disagreements
about the extent to which unionists should absorb the PT’s logic about the
realities of government and electoral concerns.
Shortly before his election victory, Lula made what seemed to be a
political volte-face by maintaining many of the macroeconomic policies
introduced by Cardoso, his predecessor. When US Treasury Secretary
Paul O’Neill visited Brazil as part of a Latin American trip in August 2002,
Brazil’s economy was in a severe crisis and US support for renewed IMF
loans and debt renegotiation meant that there was little room for manoeu-
vre for any of the presidential candidates, including Lula. In his Carta ao
Povo Brasileiro, Lula called for a leap of faith, arguing that the only way his
ambitious social agenda could be achieved was by maintaining the eco-
nomic framework of the previous government. This argument dominated
the political agenda of the first Lula administration and union leaders also
echoed this rationale in their campaigns. Although the Brazilian economy
improved significantly after Lula was elected, many critics were not pre-
pared to step over what they viewed as Lula’s “selling out” to global capi-
tal, the international financial institutions, and the USA. This episode set
the scene not only for the PT’s electoral successes, reflecting the argument
in favour of combining economic prosperity, political moderation, and
social improvements, but it also accounted for the heated debates held
within the union movement.
After a slow start, the government’s macroeconomic policies began to
result in economic growth in 2004, with Brazil maintaining primary bud-
get surpluses and reducing inflation to single digits. High global prices for
Brazilian products such as iron ore, soy, and manufactured goods also
fuelled the country’s economy, leading to trade surpluses and the success-
ful diversification of exports.3 As a result of this turnaround, the urban
unemployment rates that had steadily increased since the mid-1990s
decreased consistently after 2004.4 Sustained economic growth, relatively
low inflation, and growing employment all contributed to improvements
in social indicators after 2004,5 as Brazil experienced a significant decline
in income inequality, reducing the Gini coefficient by 5.4% points between
1998 and 2009.6 Increased domestic spending fuelled by increasingly
accessible consumer credit, social policies, and higher minimum wage lev-
els not only improved social indicators but also contributed to economic
recovery,7 which lasted until the economy began to slow down in 2009.
Underlining the significant role of government policy in these changes,
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 181
between those groups within the union movement who wanted to push
the government towards radical reforms and those who did not want to
rock the boat in exchange for political influence. The single most contro-
versial reform during this period was the plan to adjust Brazil’s social secu-
rity and pension systems, which affected public sector workers in particular
while illustrating the different political approaches that emerged in the
union movement at this moment in time. Following on from Cardoso’s
reforms, the Lula government proposed to cap retirement benefits while
increasing the minimum age and years of service requirements to draw a
pension and taxing public sector pension benefits by 11%.47 In a debate
that echoed the conflicts about privatization in the 1990s discussed in
Chap. 5, these reforms resulted in significant splits between private- and
public-sector unions, with the latter expressing their opposition in a politi-
cally radical manner.
The public-sector unions were vehemently opposed to the reforms,
viewing it as the government’s deliberate decision to erode their rights
and entitlements,48 while they attempted to escalate demonstrations and
strike action to force the government to withdraw the proposals.49 Yet the
CUT’s national leadership opposed the strikes and declared that they
would be negotiating aspects of the proposal instead of rejecting it.50
When the public-sector unions threatened to set up an alternative central
union organization to represent their interests, the CUT’s president, Luiz
Marinho, argued that if the unions simply opposed the reforms, their
demands would fall on deaf ears, so negotiation was essential in his view.51
Although the proposal passed in Congress, the PT’s congressional repre-
sentation also experienced divisions as the party expelled three deputies
and one senator for voting against the proposal; they subsequently set up
a party with a political agenda explicitly to the left of the PT, the Partido
Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL). This debate reveals an unresolved conflict
about the extent to which unions should actively oppose government pol-
icy if it hurt workers’ interests. Despite the apparent alignment between
trade unions and the PT, this example illustrates that in cases where unions
perceived government policy as directly hurting workers’ interests—the
CUT’s large and powerful public-sector constituency in this case—the
close union-party relationship was far from representative of the union
movement as a whole.
In contrast, the campaign to increase the minimum wage was an area in
which union demands and the government agenda coincided more explic-
itly. The government’s minimum wage policy not only represented a key
190 M. RIETHOF
labour demand for wage improvements but also a cornerstone of the gov-
ernment’s macroeconomic policy, which was to expand domestic con-
sumption as a source of economic growth. As a result of this policy, the
real minimum wage increased significantly in 2005 and 2006 at levels well
above inflation. Even when economic growth declined from 2009, the
real minimum wage continued to increase, in line with inflation as well as
economic growth, while the government’s social programmes magnified
its social impact.52 We can in fact consider the minimum wage campaign as
one of the most successful labour campaigns waged after 2003 because the
government agreed to regular minimum wage increases which had a real
effect on people’s incomes. Union campaigners demanded that the mini-
mum wage should be adjusted to inflation and economic growth, a pro-
posal which the unions had wanted to include in the 1988 Constitution
but which never materialized.53 The Lula government initially did not
meet its promise of a new minimum wage policy “despite considerable
pressure” from the unions54 but proceeded to establish a quadripartite
commission, including government, business, union, and pensioner repre-
sentatives, to discuss the minimum wage.55 In 2007 the campaign resulted
in a policy guaranteeing the annual adjustment until 2023 of the mini-
mum wage according to the previous year’s inflation and economic
growth.56 The significance of the minimum wage campaign reflected the
new unionism’s long-lasting legacy of successful wage claims since the late
1970s, as well as their long-standing moral argument that economic
growth should be translated into wage increases and compensate for infla-
tion. The minimum wage campaign also exemplified new forms of labour
mobilization to achieve policy changes in a context in which the govern-
ment opened up channels for political participation.
The minimum wage increases did not just result from coinciding inter-
ests between the government and the union movement, they also involved
labour mobilization to put pressure on the government to keep to its
commitments. In 2004, the national union organizations launched a joint
minimum wage campaign, organizing three marches in Brasília in 2004,
2005, and 2006. The marches were symbolic in that the unions aimed to
get the government to commit to a policy change that was already likely
to happen, rather than using mass mobilization as leverage for policy
change.57 Furthermore, union arguments consciously replicated the gov-
ernment’s macroeconomic argument that a higher minimum wage would
produce economic growth by increasing purchasing power,58 underlining
the extent to which leading unionists had absorbed the PT’s governmental
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 191
2500 2500
2000 2000
1500 1500
1000 1000
500 500
0 0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Total Public Private
340 in 2003 and 2004, public-sector strikes became larger and longer as the
number of workdays lost to strikes in both the public and the private sector
increased after 2003.64 These trends meant that even if the total number of
strikes stagnated, labour conflicts became harder to resolve and more politi-
cized, particularly in the public sector.65 These trends also indicate the
growing space for public-sector unions and left-wing voices to assert their
dissatisfaction with the CUT’s stance towards government policy.
These internal conflicts also affected the relationship between the CUT
and its affiliated unions, signalling the distancing of the national leadership
from grassroots unionists given the latter’s willingness to contest the focus
on political stability. For example, in September 2004 bankworkers went
on strike for 30 days, after which the CUT-affiliated National Bankworkers’
Confederation (Confederação Nacional dos Bancários, CNB) negotiated a
national wage agreement. Nevertheless, grassroots union meetings ended
up rejecting the agreement, accusing the CNB of betraying them and pan-
dering to the government’s macroeconomic goals while neutralizing union
militancy. The CNB in turn accused the opposition groups of protesting
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 193
In the second half of Lula’s first administration, the debate about labour
reform further sharpened disagreements concerning political strategies.
Between 2005 and 2008 the combination of economic recovery, proposals
for labour reforms, and the worsening corruption crisis all affected the
union movement’s political strategies. Bearing this in mind, this section
194 M. RIETHOF
illustrates three trends in labour politics under the Lula government that
contributed to weakening the union movement’s political bargaining posi-
tion despite a more positive economic context: the growing dilemma of
opposition or collaboration with the government; the fragmentation cre-
ated by political divisions within the union movement; and the increasing
distance between union leaders and grassroots activists. Although the ten-
dency towards political moderation evident in the early years of the first
PT-led government continued, these dilemmas led to dissatisfaction with
the lack of progress. Internal conflicts also became more visible, particularly
in the case of social security and labour reforms, leading to mobilization
against government proposals. These divisions resulted in strategic immo-
bilization, magnifying the dilemma of the union movement’s political
power, which translated into access to political decision-making on the one
hand, and a lack of progress regarding key labour demands on the other.
As economic growth returned on the basis of the diversification of
Brazil’s export portfolio and unemployment declined, militant labour
action also continued to stagnate. Similar to 2003 and 2004, in the fol-
lowing two years, public-sector strikes continued to dominate the labour
scene, while the most significant change was that the more positive eco-
nomic outlook allowed unions to make progressive wage demands in 69%
of strikes, moving away from a defensive position.67 The question of new
unionism’s loyalty to the Lula government re-emerged after the mensalão
corruption scandals surfaced in 2005. The scandal involved vote-buying—
on a monthly basis, which explains the term mensalão (“big monthly pay-
ment”)—to ensure majorities for the government’s legislative proposals.
Although Lula was never directly accused in the mensalão investigations,
several figures close to the party leadership and senior trade unionists had
to resign. The corruption scandals not only affected the PT’s reputation as
a party with “clean” politics68 but also illustrated that the party’s problems
spilled over to its union allies when it became clear that several union lead-
ers were also involved in corruption. The lack of mass protests against the
government was a major factor in explaining why the corruption scandals
never seemed to touch Lula69; however, civil society organizations were
also reluctant to mobilize in support of Lula given the scale of the corrup-
tion.70 Both the PT-supporting unions and social movements were torn
between their rejection of corruption, the knowledge that several key
union figures had been involved, and the realization that the alternative
could be much worse if Lula lost the elections. In this challenging political
context, the government initiated a debate about reforming the country’s
corporatist labour and trade union legislation.
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 195
With reference to the new unionist argument from the 1970s and
1980s that democracy started in the workplace, the CUT leadership pre-
sented these demands as the final step in the democratization process, a
view echoed by the FNT’s president, the PT’s Ricardo Berzoini.79
However, a significant segment of the union representatives vehemently
disagreed with these proposals, particularly the abolition of the unicidade
sindical principle and the union tax, a position that was already evident in
the labour reform debates in the 1980s. A major proportion of Brazilian
trade unionists continued to support corporatist control because it guar-
anteed a union’s existence and provided financial resources through the
union tax, whether they actively represented their members or not.
Dissatisfied with the FNT, a coalition of confederations which supported
maintaining corporatist unionism set up an alternative discussion forum,
the Fórum Sindical dos Trabalhadores (Union Labour Forum, FST) to
organize protests against the government’s proposals and push for an
alternative proposal in Congress.80 The employers represented in the FNT
shared many of the FST’s concerns, thereby effectively supporting the
continuation of corporatist labour relations, and rejecting the right to
workplace union representation.81 Finally, the government position also
faced opposition in Congress from deputies sympathetic to official union-
ism and business interests respectively. Despite the disagreements, the
FNT managed to send a joint proposal for discussion to Congress in
March 2005, just weeks before the mensalão scandal broke out.
The proposal presented to Congress had incorporated several core new
unionist demands, including the abolition of the union tax over three years,
replaced by a collective bargaining fee. The proposed reforms also opened
up the possibility of multiple unions representing a particular category of
workers, with each union required to have a membership of at least 20% of
the workforce in a given occupational category. Furthermore, a new
Conselho Nacional de Relações de Trabalho (National Labour Relations
Council, CNRT) would redefine the 1940s corporatist professional cate-
gories still used to organize unions and oversee their representativeness.82
In the midst of the corruption scandals and Lula’s re-election campaign,
the union reforms fell by the wayside, with several of the proposal’s ele-
ments introduced in a piecemeal fashion over the next few years. For exam-
ple, the CNRT was set up by presidential decree in 2006 but never got off
the ground, while central union organizations, whose position was already
recognized in practice through their participation in several national
forums, were finally legalized in 2010. In fact, the labour reforms primarily
198 M. RIETHOF
The labour reform process left many unionists dissatisfied with the
CUT and the limitations of the government’s participatory decision-
making process, underlining the divisions the close union-party-union
relations created and the dilemmas of opposition under the PT. As a result,
alternative central union organizations began to emerge when the Ministry
of Labour renegotiated the recognition criteria for national union organi-
zations in 2007.89 Three organizations were founded by former CUT sup-
porters to occupy a space to the left of the CUT leadership and were
associated with left-wing parties that struggled to position themselves
within the PT-dominated CUT.90 The Corrente Sindical Classista left the
CUT and set up the Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil
(Brazilian Workers’ Central, CTB, affiliated with the PCdoB); disgruntled
public-sector unionists set up CONLUTAS (Coordenação Nacional de
Lutas, National Struggle Coordination—affiliated with the Trotskyist
PSTU); and those who opposed the 2003 social security reforms set up
Intersindical (affiliated with the PSOL).91 Although these alternative
union organizations never reached either the size or political profile of the
CUT and Força Sindical, they began to position themselves as a left-wing
alternative that would represent groups such as public-sector workers
while less reluctant to mobilize against the government.92
Paradoxically, the long-awaited legal recognition of central union orga-
nizations confirmed the distancing between the national leadership and
the affiliated unions, as the labour reform proposals “strengthened the top
union leaderships, transferring negotiations to the union centrals and
therefore restricting the activities of unions and workplace assemblies”.93
Another indication of the growing divisions was the willingness of public-
sector workers to go on strike in this period, with large and lengthy strikes
in the oil sector, banking, the civil service, teachers and federal universities
between 2005 and 2008. This period saw an increase in labour protests
with a political agenda, for example, protests against privatization in
Petrobras and against corruption in the postal service.94 As these labour
conflicts spread to strategic economic sectors—such as energy, construc-
tion, and infrastructure—they created a new surge in labour militancy
from 2009 onwards, a less well-recognized aspect of the mass discontent
that emerged in 2013.
In sum, although access to political influence had become a real oppor-
tunity through the participatory forums with prominent unionists taking
up government posts, the CUT leadership faced a trade-off between capi-
talizing on this close relationship and voicing opposition to the PT; the
latter could involve workers losing political influence by destabilizing the
200 M. RIETHOF
need parties) and “Nem direita nem esquerda, somos Brasil!” (Neither
right nor left, we are Brazil!). In 2015, the protests turned against the
government with a particular focus on corruption, coinciding with the
“Lava Jato” (“car wash”) corruption investigation which implicated many
top politicians.96 Eventually, increasing social and political pressure on the
government culminated in Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in August
2016. The demonstrations created new dilemmas for trade unions, includ-
ing how to respond to and participate in the protest movements as well as
how to rethink their relationship with the PT as the government slid into
an accelerating crisis.
The country had not seen this scale of protests since the 1980s (the
Diretas Já campaign) and 1992 (the mass protests for Collor’s impeach-
ment), so they came as a surprise to many observers. However, the roots
of the widespread dissatisfaction that provoked these demonstrations can
be found in the socio-economic and political developments of the 1990s
and 2000s. The unprecedented social mobility Brazilians experienced in
the 2000s as a result of economic expansion and government social poli-
cies, together with raised expectations of what the government could
achieve in a deteriorating economic context, goes some way towards
explaining the intensity of the protesters’ disillusionment.97 Mattos views
the June 2013 protests as a culmination of the agendas that social move-
ments and unions had promoted for years but which had become weak-
ened and fragmented under the PT-led governments, which in his view,
helps account for why the established social movements did not play a
major role in the demonstrations.98 Anger about corruption was another
factor which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people against the gov-
ernment in 2015 and 2016. The combination of corruption scandals that
reached ever closer to the PT leadership, anger about government spend-
ing priorities given the context of decelerating economic growth, and the
upcoming presidential elections in 2014 proved to be an explosive mix,
leading to massive protests with participants drawn from across the politi-
cal spectrum.
One of the key characteristics of the mass demonstrations was their
diverse demands, strategies, and political views, while trade unions, social
movements, and PT supporters initially remained at the margins. Indeed,
Tatagiba argues that during the mass demonstrations between 2013 and
2016, protestors’ demands ranged from increasing education and health
spending, to the implementation of specific social policies, political
reforms, tackling police violence and corruption, and finally calls for Dilma
202 M. RIETHOF
nal frustrations with the political process. The protests thereby underlined
the political differences among various groups within the union move-
ment, focusing once again on the extent to which union action should
support or challenge the government.
The key political paradox for the unions in this context was to maintain
the union-party relationship as a source of power in the face of widespread
popular scepticism about the country’s political culture while also mobi-
lizing the public when the demonstrations turned against the unions’
political ally. A general strike organized jointly by Brazil’s central union
organizations in July 2013 happened somewhat late in the day, the first
such event since 1996. The general strikes of the 1980s and 1990s were
iconic protests against government austerity policies, underlining the
union movement’s ability to mobilize large numbers across Brazil. In turn,
the lack of general strikes from the mid-1990s onwards symbolized the
unions’ political crisis, meaning that a return to large-scale strikes marked
a turning point in the union movement’s involvement in the protest waves.
In March 2015, however, as the mass protests became explicitly anti-
government and anti-PT in character in the context of the deepening
Petrobras corruption scandals, the CUT organized somewhat lacklustre
demonstrations to support the elected government and the petroleum
company, despite the growing public outrage. According to left-wing crit-
ics, these protests, which were a lot smaller than the anti-government pro-
tests, highlighted the CUT’s “governmental” and conciliatory character.
A declaration of the Corrente Sindical Classista presented during a meet-
ing of the CUT’s national executive urged the organization to use the
recent wave of strikes and the economic downturn as an opportunity to
protest against the government, as it was “impossible to derail an austerity
policy by negotiating it”104 with the government. As opposition forces
began to push for Dilma’s impeachment, the central union organizations
and social movements—with the MST and MTST (Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Sem Teto, Homeless Workers’ Movement) at the fore-
front—began organizing demonstrations against what they saw as a threat
to democracy, mobilizations that grew as impeachment became more
likely. These examples suggest that the June demonstrations not only
highlighted the political dilemmas of the union movement but eventually
re-invigorated its ability to mobilize people, despite the many factors that
had restricted organized labour’s political impact since the mid-1990s.
The struggle between militant and moderate strategies also manifested
itself in a new wave of labour militancy, amplifying the internal conflicts
204 M. RIETHOF
6.5 Conclusion
Faced with the prospect that Dilma would be impeached and replaced by
a president who was much less sympathetic to their demands, left-wing
parties, movements, and protestors began protesting against impeach-
ment, coalescing around the principle that the president’s electoral man-
date had to be respected.112 Although these protests gave the left a new
focus, the demonstrations in favour of the president and her democratic
mandate proved insufficient to prevent her Senate impeachment in August
2016. Rousseff’s fall from power marked a decade of increasing political
polarization, leading to a political crisis at the heart of Brazilian political
culture, which in turn was reflected in a similar political crisis for the
union movement. This chapter has traced the role of labour politics in
terms of these competing forces, arguing that the dynamics of labour mili-
tancy and moderation were a significant but mostly unrecognized aspect
of the political polarization process. As a result of these conflicting devel-
opments, the labour landscape as it evolved in the 2000s and 2010s was
much more complex than suggested by arguments about an inevitable
road to decline and political moderation. Instead, this chapter’s focus on
the conflicts created by the new political scenario shows that while the pull
towards political moderation was strong, the forces driving labour mili-
tancy continued to exist. With Lula’s election to the presidency, union-
party relations changed significantly, exerting a moderating influence on
organized labour. Significant sectors of the union movement became
incorporated in the government after 2003 as many unionists took on
ministerial posts and participated in consultative forums, turning orga-
nized labour into a strategic political actor within the government.
Mobilizing their newly won political influence, the union leadership ini-
tially focused on influencing government policy, leading to a preference
for negotiation over confrontation. Like many other social movements,
the unions also took part in the government’s participatory forums to
debate major policy areas. Although the political and economic circum-
stances ostensibly became much more positive for effective labour politi-
cal strategies, the actual political situation was more complex as some
centrist union activists were reluctant to challenge government policies
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 207
period left considerable space for labour militancy to re-emerge and chal-
lenge the apparent moderate consensus.
Notes
1. The argument that the CUT’s most recent political crisis was partly
caused by its close relationship with the PT in government is shared by
many Brazilian labour scholars. See, for example, Adalberto Moreira
Cardoso, “Dimensões da crise do sindicalismo brasileiro,” Cadernos
CRH 28(75) (2015), 502–3; Ruy Braga, “Brazilian Labour Relations in
Lula’s Era: Telemarketing Operators and their Unions,” in Labour in the
Global South: Challenges and Alternatives for Workers, ed. Sarah Mosoetsa
and Michelle Williams (Geneva: International Labour Organization,
2012), 116; Armando Boito Jr. and Paula Marcelino, “O sindicalismo
deixou a crise para trás? Um novo ciclo de greves na década de 2000,”
Caderno CRH 23(59) (2010), 336. On the impact of civil society partici-
pation on moderation more generally in Brazil, see Evelina Dagnino and
Ana C. Chaves Teixeira, “The Participation of Civil Society in Lula’s
Government,” Journal of Politics in Latin America 6(3) (2014), 39–66;
Hernan B. Gómez, Lula, the Workers’ Party and the Governability
Dilemma in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 2013).
2. Francisco de Oliveira, “O momento Lênin,” Novos Estudos CEBRAP 75
(2006), 34–5; Ruy Braga, A política do precariado: Do populismo à hege-
monia lulista (São Paulo: Editorial Boitempo, 2012), loc. 2591; Alvaro
Bianchi and Ruy Braga, “Brazil: The Lula Government and Financial
Globalization,” Social Forces 83(4) (2005), 1760–61.
3. Edmund Amann and Werner Baer, “The Macroeconomic Record of the
Lula Administration, the Roots of Brazil’s Inequality, and the Attempts
to Overcome Them,” in Brazil under Lula: Economy, Politics, and Society
under the Worker-President, ed. Joseph L. Love and Werner Baer (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34–5.
4. International Labour Organization, 2014 Labour Overview: Latin
America and the Caribbean (Lima: ILO/Regional Office for Latin
America and the Caribbean, 2014), 65.
5. Wendy Hunter, “The Partido dos Trabalhadores: Still a Party of the Left?”
in Democratic Brazil Revisited, edited by Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy
J. Power (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 17.
6. Nora Lustig, Luis F. Lopez-Calva and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, “Declining
Inequality in Latin America in the 2000s: The Cases of Argentina, Brazil,
and Mexico,” World Development 44 (2013), 135.
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 209
23. Luiz Filgueiras, Bruno Pinheiro, Celeste Philigret and Paulo Balanco,
“Modelo liberal-periférico e bloco de poder: Política e dinâmica macro-
econômica nos governos Lula,” in Os anos Lula: Contribuições para um
balanço crítico 2003–2010, ed. João Paulo de Almeida Magalhães et al.
(Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2010), 36.
24. See for example, Ricardo Antunes, “A engenheria da cooptação e os sin-
dicatos,” Revista Pegada 12(1) (2011), 57–8; Hunter, “Partido dos
Trabalhadores,” 28–30.
25. Salvador Sandoval, “Working-Class Contention,” in Reforming Brazil,
ed. Mauricio Font and Anthony P. Spanakos (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2008); Juan Pablo Ferrero, Democracy against Neoliberalism in
Argentina and Brazil: A Move to the Left (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014); and for the wider Latin American context in this
period, see Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
26. DIEESE, Anuário dos Trabalhadores 2005 (São Paulo: DIEESE, 2005),
116.
27. Kathryn Hochstetler, “Organized Civil Society in Lula’s Brazil,” in
Democratic Brazil Revisited, edited by Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy
J. Power. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 41.
28. Luiz Marinho, “Os trabalhadores e a pauta do crescimento,” Folha de São
Paulo, September 26, 2003.
29. Agência Brasil, “Manifestantes da CUT pedem mudanças na política
econômica,” Brasília: Agência Brasil, 2004.
30. In 2003, the CUT noted that because economic policy had not changed
substantially since Lula’s election, state resources had to be devoted to an
active industrial policy to promote economic growth. See Executiva
Nacional da CUT, “Comentários sobre as ‘Diretrizes de pólitica indus-
trial, tecnológica e de comércio exterior (do Governo Lula)” (São Paulo:
CUT, December 2003), 6–7.
31. The focus on political participation was not exclusive to the union move-
ment. As Avritzer points out, this focus had its roots in Brazilian civil
society’s shift towards “the establishment of a broad form of public par-
ticipation in most areas of public policy” since the mid-1990s. Leonardo
Avritzer, “Civil Society in Brazil: From State Autonomy to Political
Interdependency,” in Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and
Protest in Latin America, ed. Sonia Alvarez and others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2017), 57.
32. Ana C. Teixeira, “Até onde vai a participação cidadã?” Le Monde
Diplomatique Brasil February 2008; for an overview of national-level par-
ticipatory councils, see Secretaria Nacional da Articulação Social, Conselhos
Nacionais (Brasília: Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República, 2010);
LABOUR STRATEGIES AND THE LEFT IN POWER: MODERATION, DIVISION… 211
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CHAPTER 7
The fortunes of the Brazilian union movement have reflected the coun-
try’s recent political history in many significant respects, particularly the
conflicts that emerged from labour’s active participation in a rapidly chang-
ing political environment. Although trade unions became a formidable
opponent to military rule in the 1970s and 1980s, like many other labour
organizations around the world, they also faced the debilitating effects of
the economic crisis which continued into the 1990s. In the 2000s, this
political dynamic changed when Lula was elected to the presidency, pro-
viding union representatives with unprecedented access to political influ-
ence, but also creating intractable conflicts when government policies
clashed with labour interests. Since the late 2000s, Brazilian politics has
witnessed a renewed wave of labour mobilization and political polariza-
tion, which spread to the wider Brazilian population during the mass dem-
onstrations that have taken place from 2013 onwards. The central
argument presented here is that the political dilemmas evident in orga-
nized labour’s political agenda can explain these waves of political polar-
ization and moderation. The union movement’s political engagement has
therefore shaped key political events, as evident in organized labour’s key
political role from the democratic transition to the left coming to power.
Instead of facing inevitable decline in the face of globalization, workers’
political influence should therefore not be discounted.
the late 2000s) as labour political strategies split into two directions: one
pulled activists towards radicalism and the other towards pragmatism.
These changes draw our attention to how the union movement itself has
experienced a thorough process of renewal and transformation, escaping
at key moments from social, economic, and political constraints to deci-
sively influence the course of political change.
To understand the longer-term implications of workers’ involvement in
Brazilian politics, their position cannot be analysed without reference to
the evolution of corporatism and national developmentalism as well as the
legacies of democratization. The state-labour relationship that emerged in
the early- to mid-twentieth century provided trade unions with legal rec-
ognition and access to political influence. However, corporatism also
depoliticized unions by curtailing the right to strike, thereby severely
restricting the extent to which trade unionists could use their structural
and associational power to exert political influence. During the same
period, the shift towards national developmentalism helped create a grow-
ing urban working class, underlining the argument that labour militancy
emerged at the intersection of national and global economic develop-
ments. To a significant extent, the trade union movement which material-
ized at the end of the 1970s was a product of rapid state-led industrialization,
as the strike wave took place in multinational corporations, sectors which
the military regime considered economically strategic. As a result, trade
unionists experienced high levels of structural and associational power,
which they managed to translate into significant political influence. Despite
the restrictive political context, the driving forces behind the strike move-
ment in this period show how union strategies became politicized, as strik-
ing workers translated their wage demands into protests against
authoritarianism. Together with these workers’ experiences with authori-
tarian labour practices in the growing industrial sector, the military
regime’s highly repressive attitude to labour opposition meant that the
new unionism movement ended up rejecting corporatism, circumventing
the restrictions on union action with novel strategies, such as sit-in strikes
and community action. These new strategies contributed to strengthening
the union movement’s position in the wider pro-democratic movement,
while its connections to social movements explain the emphasis on grass-
roots activism and internal democracy.
Building on the strike movement’s achievements, Brazilian trade unions
turned into a crucial actor in the democratization process during the late
1970s and 1980s, formulating a democratic agenda that started with the
230 M. RIETHOF
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
E
Education, 32, 36, 71, 91, 100, 136, F
138, 148, 181, 201, 205 Factory commissions (comissões de
See also Strikes; Trade unions fábrica), 41, 69, 89, 91, 93–94,
Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, 155 100–101, 120n71, 159n26
Elections, 35, 86, 95–96, 106–112, Federação das Indústrias do Estado de
156, 183, 194, 201, 230 São Paulo (Federation of
and democratization, 86, 95, 99, Industries of the State of São
228, 230 Paulo, FIESP), 134, 211n36
INDEX
239
Federação dos Metalúrgicos de São Government policy, 10, 23, 30, 63, 71,
Paulo (São Paulo Metalworkers’ 87–89, 103, 146, 200, 210n30
Federation, FMSP), 91 exchange rates, 63, 109
Federação Única dos Petroleiros exports, 63, 73, 142, 146, 180
(Unified Federation of Oil fiscal, 63
Workers, FUP), 149, 167n107 imports, 63, 142
Felício, João, 191, 198 minimum wage, 4, 14, 64, 71, 178,
Figueiredo, Ernesto (president, 183, 189–193
1979–1985), 102 monetary, 63, 211n36
Fleury, Sonia, 188 and participation, 20, 178–190,
Força Sindical (Union Force, FS), 206, 211n36
138–140, 151–152, 154, planning, 63, 70, 100, 102
161n45, 161n48, 168n124, 196, privatization, 13, 129–131,
199, 215n92 134–135, 138, 142,
Ford motor company, 91, 100, 146–154, 156, 231
115n22, 120n69 and protests, 87–89, 102–103, 143,
Formal sector, see Workers 183–184, 186–193, 203
Fórum Nacional do Trabalho stabilization, 6, 71, 73, 110,
(National Labour Forum, 141, 186
FNT), 196–198 wages, 14, 23, 87, 101
See also Labour reforms See also Industrialization; Neoliberal
Fórum Sindical dos Trabalhadores reforms; Political participation;
(Union Labour Forum, Social policies
FST), 197 Grassroots activism, 35, 60, 73–74,
See also Labour reforms 87, 112
Free Trade Area of the Americas grassroots labour activism, 7, 28,
(FTAA), 186 37–38, 41, 46, 87–96,
100–101, 104–106, 131, 154,
185, 192–194, 198, 204–207,
G 229, 231–232
Geisel, Ernesto (president, in the PT, 100, 104–106
1974–1979), 74 in social movements, 28, 35, 60,
Globalization, 7–8, 20–22, 34, 42, 73–74, 87, 112, 212n57
143, 164n80, 227, 234 See also Social movements;
and developing countries, 7, 11, Trade unions
21–22, 35, 63 Great Depression, 24, 62–63
and labour, 7, 8, 20–22, 25, 42,
46n1, 234
national variations, 22 H
structural explanations, 11, 19, Henrique, Arthur, 198, 214n74
21–22, 25 Historical sociology, 24, 45
Goulart, João See also Democratization; Labour
(president, 1961–1964), 70–71 movement theory
240 INDEX
Migration, 67, 69, 94, 118n45 and trade unions, 2, 12, 29, 35,
Militancy, 4–12, 28–31, 35–44, 42, 44, 60, 64, 66, 67,
60–62, 87–88, 91–92, 98–103, 72–75, 87–92
129–130, 178–179, 191–192, Minimum wage campaign,
199–200, 204–205, 228–230, 178, 190, 193
233–234 Mobilization, 12–13, 26–27, 33,
and attitudes to democracy, 74, 88, 131–132
150–151, 229 and democracy, 74–75, 106, 108
and confrontation, 74, 93, 112, grassroots, 44, 60, 74, 94, 193,
139, 145, 154, 202, 206 207, 232
debates about, 7, 11, 13, 20–21, 32, labour, 4, 6, 26, 42, 44, 110, 112,
39, 42–43, 86–87, 95–96, 100, 134–135, 143–145, 155,
102–103, 112–113, 133, 140, 178–179, 182, 184–186, 190,
179, 184, 230, 233 193, 198, 200, 204–205, 207,
government response to, 24, 34–65, 227–228
87, 92, 98, 102 social and political, 9, 27, 33, 43, 60,
legacy of, 28, 43, 112, 230, 232 131–132, 138–141, 200, 203
and politics, 4–9, 35–44, 71, Moderation, 2–5, 8–10, 24, 29–30,
76, 88, 112, 130, 155, 35–44, 97, 99, 106, 109, 112,
179, 184, 193 131, 182–183, 186, 194, 206,
and pro-active strategies, 227–228
5, 130, 184 accommodation (to the
and radicalism, 2, 41, 60, 65, 69, government), 3, 14, 40, 61, 129
97, 137, 228–229 debates about, 2, 9, 41, 137, 156
and resistance, 21, 42, 59–61, and defensive strategies, 5, 20
145, 154 pragmatism, 2, 9, 31, 37–38,
in the early twentieth century, 40–42, 93–94, 130, 136–139,
24, 38, 60–64 145, 154–156, 177, 183, 232
and trade union strategies, 8, 11, reformism, 9, 62, 109, 185, 207
20, 35–36, 38, 41, 66, 69, 86, and trade union strategies, 8, 11,
88, 142, 228 35–36, 41, 66, 69
See also Political idealogies See also Political idealogies; Trade
Military regime, 72–75, 87–92 unions
1964 coup, 85 Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil
authoritarianism of, 12, 21, 22, 45, Movement, MBL), 202
73, 90, 102, 112, 139, 229 Movimento Democrático Brasileiro
and democratic transition, 5, 13, 28, (Brazilian Democratic Movement,
34, 45, 86, 97–98, 108, 112, MDB), 72, 96, 116n37
227, 233 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais
and human rights, 74, 92 Sem Terra (Landless Workers’
and repression, 8, 12, 24, 28, Movement, MST), 3, 31, 138,
41–42, 44, 72–75, 86–87, 90, 155, 160n39, 165n89, 169n138,
92, 101, 149 186, 188, 203
INDEX
243
Sindicato dos Bancários de São Paulo and trade unions, 5, 13, 22, 27–28,
(Bankworkers’ Union of São 36, 38, 74, 85, 92, 103, 107,
Paulo, SBSP), 136, 140, 159n27, 137–138, 154–155, 206, 229
191, 213n59, 213n61 See also Grassroots activism;
Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC Movimento dos Trabalhadores
(ABC Metalworkers’ Union, Rurais Sem Terra (Landless
SMABC), 1–2, 88–89, 94, Workers’ Movement, MST);
98, 120n71, 142, 145, Movimento dos Trabalhadores
158n16, 159n26, 163n77, Sem Teto (Homeless Workers’
214n78, 214n79 Movement, MTST); Social
See also Metalworkers’ unions movement theory
Sindicato dos Trabalhadores na Social policies, 4, 177, 180–181,
Indústria Petróleo no Estado de 183, 201
Rio de Janeiro (Petroleum Social security reforms, 188–189,
Workers’ Union of Rio de Janeiro, 193–195, 199, 207, 231
SINDIPETRO-RJ), 164n85 State, 20–24, 27–29, 40, 43, 59–64,
Sindicato dos Trabalhadores nas 88, 98, 131, 142, 146,
Indústrias de Prospecção, 184–187, 229
Pesquisa e Extração de Mineríos budget cuts, 147, 191
(Union for Workers’ in the control of labour, 24, 67–69
Mineral Prospecting, Research federal, 63, 64, 164n82, 186, 195
and Extraction Industries, institutions, 22, 24, 27, 43, 64, 72,
SINDIMINA), 147–148, 166n92 88, 108
Sindipetro Duque de Caxias, 149 intervention, 6, 12–13, 22, 28,
Social movement theory, 32–35, 42, 63–64, 73, 85, 87, 146, 151,
45, 230 164n82, 187, 195
and class, 33 state–labour relations, 12, 24,
and democratization, 8, 35, 87 48n13, 59–60, 64, 195, 229
and identity-based, 11–34 state-led development, 75
political opportunities, 33–34 state-owned companies, 63, 73,
and protest waves, 28 101, 109, 130, 146–147, 149,
and repertoires of collective 151, 153–154, 162n61,
action, 33, 38 165n86–88, 166n94, 179, 191
rural social movements, 212n57 union autonomy from, 85, 92–93,
subjective dimensions, 32 104, 111, 134, 151, 154,
Social movement unionism, 28, 48n27 195, 198
See also New unionism See also Corporatism; Trade unions
Social movements, 9, 30–31, 33–35, Strikes, 5–7, 12–13, 22–23, 26, 28,
137–138, 169n136, 185–188, 35, 37, 40–41, 44–45, 62, 66–68,
191, 193–194, 201–203, 212n57 80n64, 86–95, 99–104, 117n43,
and democratization, 74, 87, 229 130–137, 144–146, 155,
and the PT, 30–31, 36, 103–104, 178, 182, 191–192,
182, 185–188, 233 203–206, 229–231
INDEX
247
U W
Unemployment, 5, 13, 26, 41, 45, Wages, 4, 64, 67, 70–71, 73, 75,
99–100, 113, 131, 135, 88–89, 158n14, 180–184
142–145, 148, 166n94, 180, and globalization, 19, 25, 42
185, 194, 232 and strikes, 1–2, 88–89, 92,
Unicidade sindical (monopoly on 100–101, 149, 205
union representation), and trade union strategies, 23,
66, 111, 195 42–43, 70, 88–89, 92,
Unidade Sindical (Union Unity, UnS), 97–101, 130, 144–145,
93, 97–98, 107, 197 157n4, 189–190, 230
See also Corporatism See also Collective bargaining;
Union reforms, see Corporatism; Minimum wage campaign
Labour reforms Wall Street Crash, 62
INDEX
249
Workers, 8, 12–13, 21, 25–28, 33, working class (classe operária), 106
38–39, 41–46, 70–75, 87, See also Labour; Trade unions
96–102, 131–132, 143, 197, Working class, see Class
207, 227, 229, 232 Working conditions, 22–23, 25, 27,
and corporatism, 64–68 43, 88–89, 97, 130, 139, 145,
formal sector, 61, 67 166n97, 200, 204–205, 230
industrial, 12, 41, 69, 74, 79n42, Workplace activism,
136, 142 see Grassroots activism;
informal sector, 67, 106, 138 New unionism;
rural, 67, 106, 138, 160n29, 196 Trade unions