Labor federations in Brazil and Argentina have different responses to the unemployed

Study compares the divergent policies of Brazilian and Argentine organizations during the crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – Unemployment rates in Brazil and Argentina were high in the late 1990s and early 2000s, surpassing 12% in Brazil and reaching well over 20% in Argentina in 2002. At the time, however, the response to these social circumstances was quite different in the two countries, according to a study published in book form.

Whereas unemployed Argentines organized themselves on a national scale, forming picket lines that blocked streets, bridges and avenues and making themselves the principal protagonists of the wave of protests that shook the country, unemployed Brazilians responded to the situation in a less emphatic manner, says the book Sindicalismo e desempregados: um estudo comparativo das centrais sindicais do Brazil e Argentina (1990-2002) [Unionism and the unemployed: a comparative study of labor federations in Brazil and Argentina (1990-2002)], by Davisson Cangussu de Souza, recently published with funding from FAPESP.

According to Souza, also quite different was the behavior by the two countries’ main labor federations: the Unified Workers’ Central (CUT) and the Força Sindical in Brazil, and the General Confederation of Labor of the Argentine Republic (CGT) and the Argentine Workers’ Central Union (CTA) in Argentina, all subjects of his research.

A professor of undergraduate and graduate studies in Social Sciences at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Guarulhos campus, Souza conducted the study, which resulted in the book, during his doctoral program under the guidance of Heloisa Helena Teixeira de Souza Martins, currently a retired professor from the University of São Paulo (USP).

“The topic was a continuation of the study I had done during my master’s, when I’d analyzed the work of one particular union, the metalworkers of Campinas and the surrounding area, in the face of massive layoffs,” Souza said.

“I realized in the initial study that from the standpoint of the work of the trade unions, an unemployed person is a political subject, unlike the person who has been laid off. The person who has been laid off maintains a connection to his professional status, and his situation arouses his union’s response. The unemployed person ends up divested, in a manner of speaking,” he said.

According to Souza, the status of “unemployed” can be used to refer to anyone who has been laid off for some time, who has moved through several types of jobs, or even someone who has never worked, as in the case of young people who aspire to the job market.

“During my doctorate, I decided to conduct further studies on the unemployed. I realized that because an unemployed person is not connected to any particular job, I would not be able to focus on a specific union, but, rather, I had to study the actions of an entity that could organize a fight for all workers. This role is played by the labor federations,” he explained.

The comparison with Argentina became quite clear because of the size of the demonstrations by unemployed workers in that country during the early 2000s. “Because they were not allowed to go on strike because they were not involved in manufacturing, the unemployed joined picket lines, not at the factory gates but on the highways, avenues and bridges, hindering the movement of goods,” Souza reported.

Policy of professional retraining

In the Brazilian case, the study found that although the labor federations had been concerned about the issue of unemployment and offering services to the unemployed, there was no effort on their part to encourage the unemployed to organize politically.

“I draw a distinction between what would be the fight against unemployment and the fight of the unemployed because it is entirely possible to carry the banner against unemployment and come up with a long list of claims with regard to the topic without necessarily representing the unemployed politically,” he said.

The author points to the fact that the Brazilian labor federations offered services to unemployed workers. Principal among them were professional retraining courses based on the notion of employability.

“The federations believed that they needed to retrain the workers so they could keep pace with the new demands in the job market. That was the main policy of the Brazilian labor federations with regard to the unemployed. And that policy was a sign of the times, characterized not only by the rise of neo-liberal thought and the restructuring of production but also by major political-ideological changes in the trade union movement,” Souza said.

According to the book’s author, Brazil in the 1980s saw the rise of what scholars call “combative unionism.” It was a unionism whose principal tools of action were strikes and mass demonstrations.

In the 1990s, however, there was a change in the political-ideological culture of these unions from “combative unionism” to the so-called “collaborative unionism,” which began to place a priority on dialogue, reconciliation, and the social pact between employees and employers.

“This orientation became hegemonic not only in the Força Sindical, established in 1991, but also in the CUT, established in 1983. This was so much the case that both ended up establishing very similar instruments in 1998 and 1999 at the height of the period I studied: the Center for Employment and Income, on the part of the CUT, and the Center for Worker Solidarity, on the part of the Força Sindical, with the main purpose of acting as intermediaries in the hiring of the workforce, serving as a type of employment agency,” Souza said.

The crisis in Argentina

In Argentina, the process occurred quite differently. Until the early 1990s, the country had enjoyed low rates of unemployment and above-average socio-economic indicators for Latin America. Argentina’s economic and social conditions, up to that point, were the best in Latin America.

“In the early 2000s, however, after 10 straight years of two Menem administrations, with their economic policy geared towards parity between the peso and the US dollar, privatization of public services, and financial and trade liberalization, Argentina was plunged into crisis. Unemployment rates jumped from 3% or 4% to over 20% at times,” Souza said.

It was within this context that the “picketer” movement began. The CGT – which was established in 1930 and held a historic link to Peronism, even defining itself as a Peronist federation – proposed not a single policy to represent the unemployed.

The CTA, the other Argentine labor federation studied in the book, was established in the 1990s as an alternative to the CGT, precisely because it disagreed with the policy that had been put in place.

“It emerged in opposition to the neoliberal policy of Menem and its alignment with the CGT. It began with little power because just a few unions signed up, but then it grew in large measure because of the organization and unionization of unemployed workers. Unlike other labor federations, the CTA opened its ranks to previously non-unionizable workers,” Souza said.

According to the researcher, the CTA expanded the notion of working class, which began to include everyone who works, i.e., the workers; those who would like to work but have not yet found a job, i.e., unemployed workers; those who are employed but have no employment contract, i.e., informal workers; and those who used to work but no longer do, i.e., retirees.

Turning point

One of the topics presented in the book Sindicalismo e desempregados is that the response to the question of the unemployed became a turning point between “combative unionism” and “collaborative unionism”. “This is quite evident in the type of agreement that the principal unions of the CUT, such as the Union of Metalworkers of the ABC, began to draft in order to prevent the dismissals,” Souza said.

“If, before, the union position in the face of dismissals was strikes, work stoppages, and protests, this attitude was replaced by dialogue and understanding. There were the so-called tripartite agreements that involved government, employers, and workers. However, this type of accord, which caused wages to drop, was unable to hold back the tide of dismissals. Unemployment went up just the same,” he said.

The different ways of organizing the unemployed in Brazil and Argentina and the different responses by the labor federations to the question of the unemployed are the result of a series of factors that Souza describes in his book. However, there is one factor that the author highlights in particular, which in a way constitutes the backdrop for everything.

“In Brazil, we have the chronic presence of a relative overpopulation, which Marx referred to as the ‘industrial reserve army’,” he stated. “It’s a tradition of informal work, of secondary employment fueled by the wave of migration, the rural exodus and the population displacement, mainly from Brazil’s northeast to its large urban centers. In Argentina, this working class historically earned better wages than in Brazil,” he said.

• Title: Sindicalismo e desempregados: um estudo comparativo das centrais sindicais do Brasil e Argentina (1990-2002)  [Unionism and the unemployed: a comparative study of labor federations in Brazil and Argentina (1990-2002)]
  
  Author: Davisson Cangussu de Souza
  Publisher: Fino Traço Editora
  Year: 2013
  Number of pages: 384
  Price: R$ 55
  Additional information: www.finotracoeditora.com.br/livros/SO6824/9788580541212/sindicalismo-e-desempregados-um-estudo-comparativo-das-centrais-sindicais.html