The Brazilian System of Labour Relations and the Revival of the Labour Movement

Abstract

As part of its strategy to pursue developmental goals, the entire period of Vargas’s leadership, including the initial phase before the ‘Estado Novo’ (1937-45), rested upon state corporatism. For the purposes of this book we shall leave aside other types of corporatism and focus on the statist variant, historically by far the most important, at least in the Brazilian context. Reference to corporatism therefore will mean state corporatism. As a model, corporatism refers to a specific structure of organisation of interest groups by the State. In Mericle’s words (1977: 303), the term describes ‘a system of interest-group representation in which the State plays a major role in structuring, supporting, and regulating interest groups with the object of controlling their internal affairs and the relations among them’.¹