The Brazilian labor unions I encountered

Many people, when discussing labor conflicts, claim that trade unions in our country are too weak—far less powerful than those in the United States or Brazil—and have failed to secure workers’ interests. I have never worked in the U.S., but the strength of American unions is closely tied to the hollowing-out of its manufacturing sector: when Fuyao Glass entered the U.S., it boldly declared that if unions were established within its enterprise, it would withdraw investment altogether. At the very least, Mr. Cao Dewang clearly understands the role American unions play. I won’t dwell on American unions; instead, let me talk about Brazilian unions—ones I personally confronted head-on. When I first arrived in Brazil, we hired a local HR director reputed to wield considerable influence and capable of maintaining smooth communication with unions, thereby guaranteeing our company would avoid strikes. Our firm was a high-tech enterprise, and indeed, for many years, no strikes occurred there. Yet every year, the union would visit the company to negotiate: citing Brazil’s annual inflation rate, they demanded across-the-board salary increases of 7% to ensure employees’ living standards did not decline—and threatened strikes if their demand wasn’t met. Consequently, each year we had to hire specialized consulting firms to negotiate with the union, ultimately agreeing—on the eve of the scheduled strike—to a 6.8% general raise. Then came annual leave negotiations: the union would haggle over whether to grant one extra day or deduct one day; over how much the year-end bonus should increase relative to the previous year. Crucially, these benefits applied universally to all employees—not performance-based incentives rewarding top performers or those rated ‘A’, but blanket welfare provisions for everyone. Because Chinese people generally fear lawsuits or union strikes abroad, once I arrived, the company’s over 4,000 local employees quickly detected this Chinese aversion to confrontation. The local female HR director’s position became as stable as an old dog’s—while successive Chinese HR leaders came and went, her post remained unshaken, and her salary kept rising. She even developed her own logic: Chinese HR managed only Chinese staff; local HR managed local staff; and Chinese HR must never interfere in how local HR managed local employees. Whenever a Chinese supervisor or HR professional raised questions, she would respond—with condescending English spoken in a thick Brazilian accent—‘That is our Brazil law’ or ‘The Work Union would not approve that.’ After being intimidated repeatedly by local HR in this manner, I finally lost my temper. If unions were truly so fearsome, then as a Chinese person, I’d pay them a respectful visit. When I announced my intention to visit the union, the existing local HR team reacted with great shock and offered all kinds of excuses. Unable to withstand my insistence, two senior members resigned. Later, I recruited two new local HR staff from the market—asking during interviews whether they could accompany me to meet union leaders. Both replied affirmatively. Six months after assuming my post in Brazil, I finally met the Rio de Janeiro union president, accompanied by a newly hired local HR colleague. Guided by Chinese thinking—that everything can be discussed, nothing is beyond negotiation—I approached the meeting expecting mutual understanding. But upon meeting the union president, I realized the company had been deliberately—or at least unwittingly—deceived by its local employees for years.

Brazil in the Twenty-First Century: Conflict and Negotiation at the Leftist Margins of Capitalism

The history of the Brazilian left is one interwoven with minor victories and major defeats. Today, it finds itself in a period of profound setback. The Workers’ Party (PT), which governed the country for over a decade, was ousted in 2016 through a parliamentary coup orchestrated by a broad coalition. While in power, the PT pursued extremely cautious politics—limiting itself to carefully negotiated reformist measures that never envisioned a post-capitalist society. In contrast, the forces that seized power after the coup have accelerated an agenda causing massive rollbacks in social policy and in individual and collective rights. Foremost among those affected are the vast ranks of wage earners, women, Black Brazilians, Indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities. This list is no accident. As this book makes clear throughout, the left is a mosaic composed of diverse movements united by their opposition to structural patterns of exploitation, domination, and oppression. Class conflict persists, yet gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation establish other collective subjects and additional axes of social struggle. Marxism—the principal theoretical foundation of the labor movement—must engage in dialogue with plural perspectives; and socialism, to retain its appeal as a political ideal, must incorporate multiple demands for equality and liberation. As Laclau and Mouffe wrote in 1985 (p. 2): ‘It is no longer possible to sustain the illusory prospect of a perfectly unified and homogeneous collective will—which would render the political moment meaningless.’ For the left, the central strategic concern lies in linking the demands of the working class with the needs of other subordinated and oppressed groups. This book explores divergent paths taken by the contemporary Brazilian left and revisits its trajectory from the late twentieth century into the early twenty-first. The significance of this debate is intimately tied to the long arc of struggle reconstructed herein—struggles that began with Brazil’s democratization movement in the 1980s and culminated in the end of over twenty years of military-civilian dictatorship (1964–1985), marked by pervasive political and social repression. These movements included not only the founding of the Workers’ Party itself, but also the emergence of new social actors fighting for housing and public health, and for respect toward gender diversity—movements that not only helped dismantle the dictatorship but also opened a vision for improving the lives of the country’s most marginalized workers. Yet the political struggles following democratic transition were far from smooth: the new political order emerged amid a global retreat of the left (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology), while Brazil’s elite simultaneously sought to reconcile formal democracy with deeply entrenched social inequality—a hallmark of the nation’s history. Indeed, Brazilian political history can be summarized as an enduring contest between waves of popular democratization and the elite’s determination to preserve social hierarchy unchanged. It is precisely for this reason that Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. The origins of the Brazilian left: Anarchists and Communists Modern leftist thought emerged in Brazil in the early twentieth century. Slavery was not abolished until 1888. To replace enslaved labor and implement the social elite’s ‘whitening’ policy, Brazil opened its doors to impoverished European immigrants. These newcomers worked both on plantations and in Brazil’s earliest factories. Industrialization was the top priority of the republican government established in 1889—though results fell short of expectations, public loans provided an initial foundation for growth in the secondary sector.

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