Current Issues in the Labor Movement in Brazil

Abstract

The recent resurgence of militant demands from the Brazilian labor unions at a time when the ruling authoritarian regime is facing its most serious crisis since 1964 has served to promote and strengthen social solidarity among at least 850,000 workers in Sao Paulo within the most dynamic sector of Brazilian capitalism. It has also rekindled discussion on participation of the working class in the political life of the country and has led many to speculate as to whether the Brazilian working class might finally be coming out of the state of silence and immobility forcibly imposed upon it during the fifteen years after 1964. The recent developments in the labor movement in Brazil were triggered in August 1977 by a startling disclosure made by federal officials as a result of international pressure. The Brazilian government revealed that manipulation of official figures concerning wage increases for industrial workers in the years 1973 and 1974 may have caused a loss of 34.1 percent in the real wages of the Brazilian working class as a whole during that period. The way in which this disclosure came about was at once curious and illustrative. Since the early 1970s, the Departamento Intersindical de Estadistica e Estudos S6cio-Economicos (DIEESE), a consulting agency maintained by the Sao Paulo unions, had claimed that the inflation data used by the government to establish wage increases was falsified and that, as a result, the approved wage increases were less than the increases in the cost of living. The federal government never bothered to answer these charges. However, the DIEESE claims eventually achieved international attention and repercussions which led to a public pressure campaign on the Brazilian government. Some economists of the International Monetary Fund conducted an investigation which questioned the figures provided by the Brazilian government, which was then forced to admit that its figures had indeed been manipulated. The next development was the emergence of the trade-union campaign for retroactive wage increases of 34 percent to cover those previous losses. The government has maintained a certain tolerance with respect to the current union campaign,