Background
on Brazil’s labour movement
… and industrial relations
Industrial relations in Brazil can be described in most areas as
‘lean production without the participation of unions in respect
to the internal labour market’ (organisation of work, job
descriptions, internal control etc.). Historically, the organisation
of work(places) has been under the unique control of management,
whereas unions bargained on jobs and salaries and not issues of
the internal labour market. In fact till today outside the main
industrial centres there is hardly any bargaining on and regulation
of working conditions on a factory level with the participation
of unions. The law doesn’t provide that unions set up a bargaining
and grievance structure at the factory level beside a joint health-and-safety
committee (CIPA), which makes that even rights established in labour
law are often not respected.
An institutional reflection of this is that according to research
in the ‘90s less than 2 percent of the unions in Brazil had
a factory or plant commission, bargaining directly on working conditions
inside the plants with a decreasing tendency. Most of these commissions
were bargained in the early ‘80s and are only situated in
the industrial belt around Sao Paulo.
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