Labour Mobilization, Politics and Globalization in Brazil

Between Militancy and Moderation

Marieke Riethof

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319603087
• eBook ISBN: 9783319603094
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the conflicts that emerged from the Brazilian labour movement's active participation in a rapidly changing political environment, particularly in the context of the coming to power of a party with strong roots in the labour movement. While the close relations with the Workers' Party (PT) have shaped the labour movement's political agenda, its trajectory cannot be understood solely with reference to that party's electoral fortunes. Through a study of the political trajectory of the Brazilian labour movement over the last three decades, the author explores the conditions under which the labour movement has developed militant and moderate strategies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Marieke RiethofLabour Mobilization, Politics and Globalization in BrazilStudies of the Americashttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60309-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marieke Riethof¹

(1)

Modern Languages and Cultures/Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

End Abstract

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 meeting 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 agreement, 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 most difficult year of my union life.” Despite the disappointing outcome, Lula himself saw the strike as the beginning of the labour movement’s road to political power : “I thought with my feet: if the workers thought they could take the strike to the limits of the possible, they should. … This was the strike in which we lost most economically, it was a strike in which we gained absolutely nothing.” Yet, as Lula went on to observe, the strike had marked the first step on the road to political power, which would include the foundation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, the Workers’ Party) , the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT, the Unified Workers’ Central) , and eventually “the election of this union leader to the presidency of the Republic”.²

The 1979 strike marked a turning point in labour opposition to the dictatorship, transforming the union movement into a formidable opponent of the military regime. Lula’s reflections on the 1979 strike as the country’s president underlined the political importance of the strike movement that emerged in the late 1970s while also indicating that Brazil’s famous labour militancy was not straightforward or uncontested, even during the heyday of the strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The strike leaders had to consider the risks of a repressive backlash from the state, with employers threatening to fire the striking workers, all while attempting to balance the workers’ wage demands with a wider agenda for political change. These difficult choices continued to shape the Brazilian union movement’s strategies and tactics over the next decades.

Attempting to understand these strategic dilemmas, this book analyses the conflicts created by the union movement’s active involvement in a changing political environment, particularly in the context of a centre-left party with such strong and defined roots in the union movement coming to power. Much of the literature on recent Brazilian politics has interpreted the union movement’s political position as the PT’s close ally as a move away from the political radicalism of the movement’s early years, thus signalling a drift towards pragmatism and moderation . Although the trajectory of Brazilian unions cannot be analysed without reference to the changing political fortunes of the PT, to assume that its behaviour and agenda have been identical to the party’s is to simplify a complex reality. Instead, this book’s central argument is that the union movement’s political ambitions have resulted in significant conflicts, given that labour activism experienced waves of militancy and moderation rather than a linear trajectory towards pragmatism and political co-optation . Through its study of the political trajectory of Brazilian trade unions , this book explores the conditions under which trade unionists developed moderate or militant strategies. The guiding questions of this analysis focus on the contexts which have shaped these political approaches: namely how the union movement came to an accommodation with the socio-political and economic structures in which it operates and how and why labour action acquired a political dimension, whether radical or not.

The academic literature on Brazil’s recent political history has witnessed a great deal of polarized debate regarding the PT government’s legacy and the party’s relationship with civil society , including trade unions. On one side of the debate, the union movement’s position is viewed primarily as having been subordinated to, or even willingly co-opted by, the PT government. Much of the literature on the Brazilian labour and the PT has emphasized the absorption of union leaders and other groups such as the landless workers’ movement (MST) through their incorporation in government structures, reflecting the PT’s own increasingly moderate political agenda while in government.³ From this perspective, the union movement lost its voice as the legitimate representative of working people in Brazil by abandoning its critical stance towards the government. In his characteristically polemical style, Ricardo Antunes has referred to Lula as a “half-Bonaparte … politely effacing before the power of high finance while craftily managing his popular support”.⁴ Francisco de Oliveira characterized the relationship as a “hegemony in reverse”: rather than pursuing a progressive agenda when finally in power, the CUT had become “a transmission belt for neoliberal policies”, contributing to the fragmentation of the Brazilian working class .⁵ According to Maria d’Araujo’s study on union membership in government circles, the PT administrations had turned into “a confluence between government, the union movement, social movements and civil servants, ideologically mobilized and sociologically corporatist”.⁶ Moreover, David Samuels argues that due to the union movement’s moderation in parallel with similar developments in the PT, after Lula’s election to the presidency this created a dynamic whereby the government became less responsive to social pressure as the PT’s leaders “no longer have to worry as much about a trade-off between adopting an electorally pragmatic approach and losing organized labor’s support”.⁷ Meanwhile, Andréia Galvão⁸ views the CUT’s accommodation with the PT as a sign of weakness rather than a channel of political influence, having led to crippling divisions and fragmentation.⁹

For others, the improvements between 2003 and 2016 outweighed the negatives, focusing in particular on the improved legal position of trade unions, access to political influence, and social improvements such as reductions in poverty and inequality . Tonelli and Queiroz argue that the PT governments not only increased the number of formal jobs and redistributed income but also created a “permanent dialogue, initiating a process of cultural change”.¹⁰ Despite calling some of the first Lula government’s labour reforms “piecemeal”, Hall nevertheless views Lula’s attempts to strengthen the legal position of unions as a positive departure from the Latin American trend towards deregulation.¹¹ French and Fortes point to the positive effects of economic growth on job creation and wages throughout most of the 2000s, the role of social policies in poverty reduction, as well as a more positive bargaining environment for trade unions.¹² In turn, Hochstetler has argued that co-optation was not as straightforward as often suggested, as civil society mobilized to move Lula to the left in the early years of the PT government and developed alternatives to the government’s participatory mechanisms,¹³ as well as proposing new policies such as the minimum wage .¹⁴

Despite the important parallels between the PT’s and trade unions’ respective trajectories, both sides of the debate tend to overemphasize the similarities between the political trajectory of the party and the unions, which can obscure the particular dynamics of labour mobilization . While these divergent evaluations suggest disillusionment on the one hand and recognition of moderate improvements on the other, the union movement’s own position in this political scenario was equally conflicted. Indeed, although the CUT’s trajectory undoubtedly became closely intertwined with the PT government, to reduce the union movement’s position to one of co-optation and conservatism obscures the dilemmas this relationship generated. Therefore, this book explores the conflicts provoked by the uni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Labour Movements, Globalization, and the Dilemmas of Development
• 3. Labour and the State: Corporatism and the Left, 1930–1977
• 4. New Unionism: Protest, Mobilization, and Negotiating the Transition to Democracy, 1978–1988
• 5. Economic Crisis, Reform, and the Pragmatic Left, 1989–2001
• 6. Labour Strategies and the Left in Power: Moderation, Division, and Renewed Militancy from Lula to Dilma
• 7. Conclusion: Labour and the Ambiguities of Power
• Back Matter