Restructuring of Labour and Trade Unions in Brazil

Abstract

In recent years, the restructuring of production and new ways of managing the workforce in Brazil have accelerated the growth of an already huge informal sector, resulting in increased unemployment in the manufacturing industry. The flexibilization of labour has brought great insecurity to workers in terms of employment, as a consequence of a reduction in stable or permanent jobs, increased subcontracting, part-time or precarious jobs. The intensive use of outsourcing/subcontracting by firms of all kinds (including state-owned firms) has been presented as an inevitable part of market rationality and has been linked to the announcement of ‘modernity’ in the country. This whole process has affected and complicated trade union action and has represented a challenge to the Brazilian trade union movement, reinvigorated and strengthened by the struggles of the last fifteen years. Organized labour has to play a double role. It has to maintain pressure to guarantee social and labour rights, obtained after strikes against business and resistance to the military state in the 1970s and 1980s, whilst simultaneously needing to intervene in and negotiate economic growth and employment in a context of precariousness at the workplace.