Solidarity with Brazil
After the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Brazil’s Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) came under political and legal attack. In 2018, former trade union leader and head of the Workers Party, Lula da Silva, made a written address to TUC Congress from prison and the TUC unwaveringly supported the international trade union campaign for his release.
Despite the success of the Lula Livre campaign, the Brazilian government's programme of neoliberal reform and its attack on trade union rights pushed Brazil into the list of worst 10 countries for working people in the ITUC’s global rights index. Only with Lula's return to the Presidency in 2023 has the country begun to restore its former reputation as a champion of workers' and union rights.
However, with Lula facing a hostile National Congress and Bolsonaro's acolytes still active - and them having stormed the Presidential palace shortly after Lula's inauguration - Brazil remains a difficult place for workers, and the threat of return to far-right government is ever-present.
But what Lula has been able to do is take the fight for better workers' rights to a global level, and has been a strong friend to unions on the international stage.
As such, the TUC still prioritises solidarity work with our sister trade unions in Brazil, but also to work in partnership with them to advocate for strong unions worldwide.
- In detail: Trade Unions and Political Context
The CUT has its origins in the working-class resistance to the military dictatorship which ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. Officially founded alongside its associated Workers’ Party (PT) in 1983, the CUT was a key actor in Brazil’s transition to democracy. The CUT not only established a powerful apparatus of collective bargaining but have broadened themselves as representatives of the wider struggle for human rights, racial and gender equality, and democratic freedoms.
The Far-Right Legacy in BrazilSince coming to power in what has been described as a ‘constitutional coup’, the government of Michel Temer, followed by the Jair Bolsonaro administration, initiated reforms which amount to coordinated attacks on the Brazilian labour movement.
These include:
The overnight ending of ‘check off’, the process by which unions collected member subscriptions directly from pay checks, plunging unions into financial crisis.
Liberalisation of long-standing labour codes, with the working day extended and laws regulating hiring and firing relaxed.
Abolition of Brazil’s Ministry of Labour, with responsibility for trade union regulation transferred to the Ministry of Justice and the rest of its functions given to the Ministry of Finance under the aegis of Chicago School economist Paulo Guedes. Guedes has previously worked in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Initiating a decades long public sector spending freeze, amounting to the deepest and most severe austerity programme ever attempted anywhere in the world.
Brazil has strict laws banning abortion in most cases and the former Minister of Human Rights, Family and Women, Damares Alves, opposed abortion in all cases. In January 2020, Brazil’s government announced a policy change to abstinence-only sex education and one of Bolsonaro’s first acts in office was to remove LGBT rights from the Human Rights Ministry’s remit. Bolsonaro himself is known for outspoken sexist and homophobic rhetoric. In a heated exchange on the floor of Congress with fellow Congress member Maria de Rosario, he said “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it”, leading to a court case where the Supreme Court ruled he had incited rape. This inflammatory political rhetoric takes place in a context where violence against women and femicide is alarmingly high, the gender pay gap rests at 20.5%, and LGBT people experience some of the highest levels of homophobic violence anywhere in the world.The Bolsonaro government pursued policies explicitly designed to reverse improvements to the deep and persistent structural racism which permeates Brazilian society. This is reflected in inequality of access to healthcare, education and employment opportunities for Afro-Brazilians and the Indigenous, as well the extreme police violence targeted towards working class and Afro-Brazilian communities.
The situation in Brazil was - until the return of Lula - one where collective bargaining had collapsed, affirmative action designed to address deep-seated racial and gender-based inequalities had been ended, and funding had been withdrawn from government agencies responsible for education, social welfare, and ensuring human rights and environmental protection. The government’s chaotic response to the pandemic left Brazil in complete disarray and the TUC has expressed its solidarity with unions fighting to liberate themselves from misrule.
Attacks on labour organisation must be understood in the context of a government that was willing to employ far right narratives for political gain. Bolsonaro incited his supporters to take to the streets and resist an imaginary ‘communist’ threat, which he associated with women’s and LGBT rights as well as organised labour.
Resources and useful links
- The TUC has published a case study on the far-right Bolsonaro government, as part of a wider TUC report on the global far right.
- TUC Report - The Challenge to Democracy in Brazil.
- The Last Line of Defence – Global Witness Report on the killings of environmental defenders.
- ITUC Global Rights Index page for Brazil.
- The TUC promotes the vital work of the Brazil Solidarity Initiative in raising awareness breakdown of Brazilian civil society, and the conflict being waged by the state against trade unions and other civil society groups.
