Labor Rights in Bolsonaro’s Brazil – A Tragedy Foretold - 04/30/22

By Jana Silverman

As workers around the world, including Brazilian labor activists, plan their activities to commemorate May Day next week, Brazilian workers are acutely aware that they have little to celebrate right now. In 2021, 13.2% of workers were unemployed, significantly higher than already-astronomical pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, 24.3% of Brazilian workers who are lucky enough to have a job are considered underemployed, meaning that they do not receive enough hours, or that their skills and education are being underutilized at their current occupations.  In addition, a record percentage of 48.7% of all Brazilian workers labor in the informal sector, which means that they do not have legal work contracts and their employers do not pay their social security contributions, leaving them without the possibility of a public pension in their old age or social protections in case of disability.  Contributing to this perfect storm for the Brazilian labor movement is the soaring, persistent inflation that corroded working families’ real incomes by over 10% in 2021, and the incapacity of a weakened union movement to effectively negotiate cost-of-living increases for formal-sector workers.  Brazilian labor leaders are betting on an electoral victory by the Workers’ Party (PT) pre-candidate President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva to brighten this somber panorama for workers and their families, but it will not be an easy task even for Lula, especially if he comes to power without sufficient support in the fragmented Congress. 

This tragedy for Brazilian workers did not start with Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, but traces back to the economic and political crisis which began in the earlier part of the previous decade.  As external factors such as the fall in export commodity prices began to create economic pressure on the government of President Dilma Rousseff in 2014-2015, Brazilian elites began to effectively press for a thoroughgoing reform of Brazilian labor law, considered too “antiquated” and too “protective” of workers.  This reform (or “deform” as it was dubbed by unionists) was finally enacted under the interim Temer administration in November 2017, drastically altering over 100 articles in the 1943 labor code, in detriment to worker and union rights. 

Some of the most significant provisions in the reform increased employers’ ability to outsource work, introduced new forms of precarious labor contracts, allowed for concessionary bilateral labor-management agreements that lower labor standards below than what is guaranteed by law, created obstacles for low-income workers to access judicial remedies for labor law violations, and perhaps most importantly for the labor movement, eliminated the mandatory union tax, which most union organizations depended on for their financial sustenance.  Due in large part to the provisions in this reform, unions have lost 97.5% of their income from these formerly mandatory contributions and over 2.9 million workers have disaffiliated from their respective unions since the law was enacted in 2017.  

The Brazilian labor movement’s dramatic loss of political, financial, and associative power in recent years has weakened its capacity to negotiate better collective bargaining contracts for its members, to organize new members, especially among the burgeoning ranks of informal food delivery and rideshare platform workers, and to contribute to the larger struggle against the attacks on workers’ livelihoods and democratic institutions by the Bolsonaro administration.  As mentioned earlier, 52% of collective bargaining agreements negotiated in March 2022 did not guarantee any real wage increase for workers covered by these instruments, and unions were also unable to advocate for real growth in the national monthly minimum wage, which the Bolsonaro administration unilaterally increased by only R$ 112 (US$ 24) in January 2022. 

Despite their limitations, unions have refused to passively acquiesce to the varied attacks that have been thrown at them since Bolsonaro’s rise to power.  The labor movement, in conjunction with its political allies in the PT and other left and center-left parties, were able to successfully pressure the Brazilian Congress to expand the emergency pandemic aid that was given to poor and working-class families from R$ 200/month initially proposed by the Executive branch to R$ 600/month.  This meant that 27.3 million Brazilians escaped falling into extreme poverty during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.  Likewise, the union movement fought successfully against converting into permanent legislation a 2020 presidential decree which created a new form of precarious contract, the “Carteira Verde Amarela,” which offered fewer social security and unemployment benefits for young workers covered under this form of employment.

As the electoral season heats up, Brazilian unions are determined to work together to better engage their members to vote for pro-labor candidates.  On April 7 in São Paulo, nine national union federations came together to launch a common set of political demands to be presented to the candidates standing in the October Presidential elections, which include proposals to promote job creation, strengthen social protection measures, end anti-union practices, and defend democratic institutions.  Many of these same labor federations are now organizing unified May Day celebrations across the country, to protest the privations that workers are currently suffering, and to galvanize working-class support for the Lula pre-candidacy and for pro-labor Congressional candidates.  Labor leaders are hoping that popular indignation against Bolsonaro’s blatant disregard for human life during the COVID-19 pandemic, expressed in the massive “Fora Bolsonaro” protests that took over Brazil in 2021, will help power a strong vote for anti-authoritarian and anti-neoliberal candidates.  As Sergio Nobre, president of the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil’s largest labor federation, has stated, “with Bolsonaro in power, the working class has no future”.

Jana Silverman holds a Ph.D. in Labor Economics from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University. She is also a researcher with the Centro de Estudos Sindicais e Economia do Trabalho (CESIT), UNICAMP and a WBO Research Fellow.  Previously, she was Country Programs Director for Brazil of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in São Paulo from 2012-2020.  Email: jqs7099@psu.edu, ID Lattes: 4357885330837822