Auto Workers and the Working Class in Brazil

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In May 1978 a series of stoppages occurred in the auto industry in Brazil, which is concentrated in the southern industrial belt of Sao Paulo. After a decade in which the semblance of industrial peace had been guaranteed by a combination of legal controls over the trade unions, repression of rank-andfile organizations in the plants, and strict control over political opposition to the military government, the working class once again defied legal restrictions on its activities. The stoppages initiated a period of labor opposition to the state and its policies towards the working class which was to last for the remainder of 1978 and stretched into 1979. In March of 1979, the auto workers went on strike again, but this time in an all-out strike of the three metalworking unions of the southern belt that lasted for two weeks and provoked a major confrontation with the state. After a decade of apparent calm that lasted from the end of the 1968 to the strike wave in May 1978, the sudden development of the stoppages in May and the determination shown by workers at that time might appear surprising. An examination of the analyses of the working class in Latin America made in the seventies would increase rather than diminish this surprise, because the strike movement received its major impetus from workers in the dynamic industries those which expanded as a result of investment of foreign capital in Brazil from the 1950s onwards. It had been argued by some theorists that workers in the dynamic industries, of which the motor industry is one of the most important sectors, would be more likely to be incorporated into the political alliance of the dominant classes than other groups of workers (Cardoso, 1972: 93), or that they would possess qualities that would mark them off from the rest of the labor force (see, for example, Quijano, 1974: 407408 and 419). All the more surprising, then, that the stoppages in the auto industry in 1978 led to stoppages in many other industries, including traditional ones. At the same time, the opposition of the auto workers to the state and the general support that their demands for free bargaining, the right to strike,