The strike movement in São Paulo

The Brazilian labor movement was a creation by the government. It was the nationalist president Getulio Vargas who needed votes and organized a paternalistic union for that purpose.

During the military dictatorship, the structure was retained but it lost all purpose for the workers. By the 1960s and 1970s, European and North American companies had established themselves in Brazil due to low wages, and industrial workers had increased from a few million to eleven million. But during the same period, wages had fallen to a third and the official unions had done nothing about it. The workers therefore lost confidence in them and organized themselves, both within the legal structure and outside.

The organization in São Paulo’s slum suburbs for goals of the type of public transport, electricity, sewage and garbage collection, armed with liberation theology, contributed primarily to the outside structures. The first major mobilization was the struggle for better commuter trains in 1975.

In 1978, the housewives’ organizations in the slum suburbs took advantage of the rather insignificant fact that the cost-of-living index had been falsified to start a strike in São Paulo's industrial suburbs. Their husbands were challenged to seize the opportunities of the conveyor belt technology and in a short time organized one of the world’s most efficient labor movements (the pioneers were the workers at the SAAB-Scania’s factory), which could not only become the center of mass mobilization that ousted the military government but also establish itself as Brazil’s leading opposition party.

During the 90s, the movement went into difficulties. Industries have largely moved to Southeast Asia, where wages are even lower. And Brazil, too, has passed labor laws that give all privileges to union officials while prohibiting ordinary workers from doing union work. The movement’s initially extremely democratic structure has therefore been bureaucratized and become less efficient.

Which did not stop radical democratic experiments in places where the labor movement dominates.

Reading
Edward Epstein: Labor autonomy and the state in Latin America, Unwin Hyman 1989
Gay Seidman: Manufacturing militance, University of California Press 1994