Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) attended last Wednesday's May Day rally called by Brazil's largest trade unions, including CUT, which is affiliated with the PT. The Lula government, elected with unprecedented unanimous support in 2022, is implementing a corporatist policy of integrating trade unions into the Brazilian state to help suppress Brazil's class struggle.
Under the theme “For a more just Brazil,'' the May Day rally served, on the one hand, as a preparation for Brazil's pseudo-leftist elements, gathered around the Brazilian Trade Union Confederation and the Socialist and Liberal Party (PSOL). This year's local elections were a focus of attention, especially in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, where the rally was held. Meanwhile, trade union officials praised Lula's government's efforts to “rebuild Brazil” as it seeks ways to reverse the union's financial collapse and declining membership.
Explaining the unprecedented solidarity of the Brazilian trade union confederation at the May Day rally since the election of former fascist President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), CUT President Sergio Noble said: “It is the basis of trade unions. There was,” he said. Election of President Lula. ” Moreover, these rallies also provide an important forum for coordination with bourgeois politicians, with the aim of building alliances with important sectors of the bourgeoisie dissatisfied with the Bolsonaro regime, and as a result , Lula's electoral support reached its peak.
Lula was joined on stage by leaders of the Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST) and federal lawmaker Guilherme Boulos from PSOL, this year's PT-backed candidate for mayor of São Paulo. After introducing several government ministers who accompanied him to the stage, Lula said the São Paulo election would be a “real war” and that Boulos would face Bolsonaro-backed candidate and current mayor, Ricardo Nunez. Ta. Lula appealed to “everyone who voted.” [for him] In 1989, 1994, 1998, 2006, 2010, 2018… In 2022, I voted for Mr. Boulos in the São Paulo mayoral election. ”
PSOL, which split from the PT in 2004 in response to regressive pension reforms during Lula's first term (2003-2006), has recently moved closer to the PT, which has been described as a “broad front” against the PT. are doing. Bolsonarismo. Boulos, PSOL's leading proponent of this front, hailed Lula as “the best president of all time” at a May Day rally.
The amount of political opportunism seen at May Day rallies was inversely proportional to the size of the crowd. Even Lula could not contain his frustration at the lack of “the necessary effort to bring about results.” [a] More than 2,000 people attended, mostly trade union bureaucrats who hung large banners to hide the rally's debacle. The Federation of Labor Unions had expected 50,000 people to attend.
It was the first demonstration outside São Paulo city center. According to CUT President Sergio Nobre, the eastern region of São Paulo was chosen because it is “an area with a high concentration of workers.”
Contrary to Lula's claims in his speech that the “convening of the rally was inappropriate” and that the government's problems with this and other problems are likely due to “lack of communication” with the public and “fake news”. What actually exists is widespread hostility. From the workers' side, against the unions and the government. The long history of unions collaborating with corporations and the state has meant that workers' struggles have been repeatedly isolated, repurposed into fruitless negotiations and dead ends of bourgeois politics.
This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that on the Friday before the May Day rally, APEOESP, the São Paulo teachers' union, called a rally to relieve enormous pressure among teachers over growing attacks by Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, an ally of Mr. Bolsonaro. This was clearly seen when he was forced to do so. At that time, union bureaucrats affiliated with PT and PSOL did their best to prevent calls for strikes that could quickly spiral out of control, but a significant number of the more than 10,000 teachers who attended He was booed and heckled several times by the crowd. .
Situations like this, which are becoming increasingly common in Brazil and around the world, are not simply the work of corrupt union leaders who can be replaced and reformed, as the pseudo-leftists claim. The roots of trade union betrayal lie in the changing dynamics of the capitalist economy over the past 50 years. Capitalist globalization has completely undermined even the most modest reformism of trade unions, rendering them unable to even minimally protect the wages, working conditions, and jobs of the working class.
As a result, Brazil's unionization rate and union income have collapsed in recent years, a process accelerated by the 2017 labor reforms of President Michel Temer's government (2016-2018). Among other measures, it abolished the compulsory union tax enacted in 1943 by the corporatist Estado Novo dictatorship of Heturio Vargas, inspired by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy.
From 2017 to 2022, trade union tax revenue will increase from R$1.5 billion (US$296 million) to R$13 million (US$2.6 million) and from R$213 million (US$42 million) to R$1.9 million decreased to 374,000) for trade union federations. The unionization rate of Brazilian workers fell by 37% between 2012 and 2022, from 16% to 9%.
Ricardo Pata, president of Brazil's third-largest trade union federation, UGT, said the Brazilian trade union federation considers Lula's government an ally to “minimize the damage.” To achieve this goal, they are counting on Lula's government's support for a bill to be submitted to Brazil's Congress this month that would establish fees payable by workers and employers who participate in collective bargaining. Workers, whether they are union members or not, would decide on the amount of their fees at a meeting.
Meanwhile, Lula's government reinstated a series of tripartite councils and working groups made up of trade union, business, and government representatives, further integrating trade unions into the state. This policy and other corporatist measures, such as the re-creation and strengthening of the Ministry of Labour, were introduced in April 2022 by the Federation of Trade Unions in the document “Pauta da Classe Trabalhadora” (Working Class Trabalhadora), which was delivered to then-candidate Lula. As outlined in the issue). .
The true nature of the tripartite initiative, which is based on the premise that there are some common interests between “capital and workers,” is based on the activities of capital and workers that the Lula administration submitted to the Brazilian Congress in early March. This was revealed in a bill prepared by a working group to regulate the App driver. Lula said at the time that the day was “a very important day.” For “for some time no one in this country believed that it was possible to set up a bargaining table between workers and employers, and what the outcome of this table would be. “Because there wasn't one,'' he would set up another organization in the world of work. ” CUT and other trade union federations also support the bill.
However, many academics and drivers have criticized the bill, dubbing it the “UBER bill” to protect the profits of the largest app-based transportation companies. Although some rights of drivers are guaranteed, such as social security and at least the payment of minimum wage, drivers are maintained as “self-employed platform workers” with no employment relationship.
Importantly, app developers have staged a series of demonstrations since the bill was sent to Congress. Folha de Sao Paulo It also reported on May 1 that “drivers of apps that transport passengers oppose the possibility of unionization contained in the bill regulating this category.”
The anti-worker nature of the UBER bill was further exposed in Marinho's speech on national radio and television on the night of April 30th to celebrate May Day. “We need to fight job insecurity, not just in Brazil but all over the world,” he said cynically, adding, “That's why President Lula and U.S. President Joe Biden launched an unprecedented campaign for workers in New York last year. We have signed a partnership to defend rights and decent work. ”
For Lula and his Cabinet, Biden is the “most pro-worker president in history” and the guardian of global democracy, while he has been denounced as “Joe the Genocide” at pro-Palestinian protests and recently passed a record. With a massive arms budget, Biden is the “most pro-worker president in history.” For Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, the world is closer than ever to nuclear war.
The attempt by Brazilian pseudo-leftist elements outside of PSOL to hold a May Day “on behalf of class independence and internationalism” was nothing more than a cover for imperialism and the Lula regime. The rally was called by the CSP-Conlutas trade union federation, controlled by the Morenoite United Socialist Workers' Party (PSTU).
Like other pro-imperialist organizations around the world, the PSTU and CSP Konlutas portray the Ukraine war as a fight for national self-determination against “Russian imperialism” and support the arming of the “Ukrainian Resistance Movement” by the United States and NATO. are doing. CSP-Conlutas also maintains close ties with parent unions in the United States, meeting with UAW President Sean Fein in April and also attending a CSP-Conlutus meeting. labor recordsupporters of both Biden and pro-war Democrats.
In Brazil, it is possible to advance a purely national and trade union struggle against the pro-business high school reform of 2016, the labor reform of 2017, the pension reform of 2019, and the austerity policies of the Lula government. It creates the illusion that there is. The attacks by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments, including the “new fiscal framework,” continue. They ignore the global capitalist nature of these attacks and accordingly reject international struggles. The Brazilian sister organization of Argentina's Socialist Workers' Party (PTS), the Revolutionary Workers' Movement (MRT), also insists on pressuring CUT and other trade union federations to carry out this struggle. .
With such policies, Brazil's Lula government, trade union federations, and pseudo-leftists are working to politically disarm Brazil's working class and youth, paving the way for a nuclear world war.
In contrast, the International Committee of the Fourth International and World Socialist Website held a May Day rally on May 4, pointing out that the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are early fronts in the development of World War III, which threatens to engulf Brazil and all of Latin America. What is needed to stop this threat is the broadest international solidarity of the working class based on socialist perspectives. We call on you to study the May Day announcements and advance the struggle against war on the basis of the voluntary mobilization of the international working class in the struggle for socialism.
