The Imperative to Occupy at the Center and the Periphery: Struggles for Rights, Recognition, and Survival Among Working Peoples in the Many Brazils, 1940-2000

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Brazilian workers’ struggles for justice and inclusion are expressed in the most diverse of milieus, both inside and outside factories, and under the auspices of and beyond formal institutions. This panel invites exchanges between Brazilian and North American researchers who converge through their study of working worlds in Brazil during what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short twentieth-century.” Their projects engage such themes as rights and justice, urban and rural workers, formal and “informal” labor (Portes 1989), in addition to gender and race. In the spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry, panelists draw from a vast array of primary materials, including memoirs, interviews, periodicals, ethnography, and legal documents. Recognizing that the struggles of working peoples are both multi-sited and multisided, participants analyze struggles for legitimacy and recognition as they have occurred in such theaters as the Tribunal Superior do Trabalho (Belo and Droppa), local strikes and union politics (Oliveira), and even the vagaries of everyday life (Kidd and Porto). The respective contributions of these young historians offer future directions for the study of Brazilian workers by questioning geographic distortions that have long conflated Brazil writ large with its industrial South (i.e., Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo). At the same time, the panel advocates for a more comprehensive understanding of different kinds of working peoples, including actors whose embeddedness in the “informal” economy does not align with traditional assumptions about workers as unionized wage laborers in industrial settings.

Sub Track

• Labor Studies and Class Relations

Session Organizer

• Alisson Droppa, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

Chair

• Magda B Biavaschi, CESIT/UNICAMP

Individual Presentations

• A flexibilização da legislação trabalhista pelo Tribunal Superior do Trabalho: o Brasil em tempos neoliberais - Alisson Droppa, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

• A estabilidade do trabalhador no pós-guerra: luta por direitos no Tribunal Superior do Trabalho (1945-1953) - Alessandra B Silva

• On the Margins of a Periphery: Petty Tyrannies and the Politics of Everyday Life in Subaltern Recife, 1971-1979 - Gray F Kidd, Duke University

• A greve dos trabalhadores das salinas e da cadeia produtiva do sal da cidade de Cabo Frio em 1960 e seus desdobramentos políticos - Joao O Christovao

• Lutas por moradia na cidade de Salvador (Bahia, Brasil) – 1940-1980 - Lucas Torres, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)