:Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture

Abstract

In recent years, an email petition has circulated the Internet warning its readers that the Brazilian Congress was on the verge of passing legislation that would “reduce the Amazon forest to 50% of its size.” On its merits, the message was bogus, warning readers of a bill that had been shelved years earlier. To Brazilian recipients, and even to those minimally familiar with Brazil, the message was also silly: legislation passed by the Brazilian Congress would be no more likely to destroy than to save the environment. At best, it would be a point of negotiation among competing interests. John D. French's insightful book examines just this paradox within the context of the labor code introduced in 1943 by President Getúlio Vargas in 1942, the 1943 Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT). This labor code, at once progressive and authoritarian, was the major legal feature governing labor relations in twentieth-century Brazil. It is also an example of the broader conception of formal social relations managed by the state that was shared by the regime and “a generation of lawyers that set out in the 1930s to ‘correct Brazil’ through law” (p. 22). French explains the paradox the CLT represents, declaring “in the eyes of apologists, the CLT and its predecessor legislation in the early 1930s, whatever their imperfections, were examples of enlightened and pioneering statesmanship that increased and broadened available freedoms. Critics and scholars, by contrast, have tended to see the CLT and its preceding jurisprudence as a corporatist monstrosity, a top-down imposition that limited workers' freedoms and damaged civil society by forcibly incorporating unions into the state apparatus” (p. 11).