1978 Brazilian strikes

The 1978 Brazilian strikes began as a workplace protest and became a source of political empowerment. At the Scania truck factory in São Bernardo, workers downed tools after news broke that the military government had understated inflation; the strike wave that followed joined demands over wages to a wider struggle for political change, helping build a coalition that would organize beyond the unions and support Brazil’s transition from military rule to democracy.

Origins at the Scania factory

On May 12, 1978, the start of the morning shift at the Scania truck factory in São Bernardo appeared ordinary, but workers were restless. Strikes had been banned since 1964, when the military overthrew the democratic government of President João Goulart. The immediate trigger was new information that the government had manipulated national inflation figures, underestimating how much the cost of living had risen.

As the 7:00 a.m. shift began, workers put down their tools. At 8:00 a.m., plant union organizer Gilson Menezes called the union. Its president, the thirty-three-year-old activist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, arrived at the factory by noon. When the company asked him to persuade the employees to return to work, he refused. The refusal marked a decisive moment: a dispute over working conditions had become organized defiance of a ban on strikes.

From wages to political conflict

The Scania action was the first in a wave of strikes that spread across Brazil. Wages were the immediate issue, but the significance of the movement reached beyond pay. Lula later described the struggle as both economic and political: in fighting for wages, workers had also won a political victory. The strikes thus made workplace organization a means of contesting the military government’s authority, not simply bargaining within the terms it had set.

The labor movement’s resurgence formed part of a broader social reaction to a decade and a half of military rule. In 1973, intellectual Fernando Henrique Cardoso argued that democracy would be made by bringing together the social groups opposing the military. He called for the reactivation of civil society through professional associations, unions, churches, student organizations, study and debating groups, and social movements. The strikes gave that broad coalition a practical point of connection: organized workers could carry economic grievances into a larger campaign for political change.

Building a wider coalition

The movement that began at Scania helped set the stage for a political organization that would not be limited to union members. By late 1978, Lula was proposing a new party. He insisted that it should represent all wage earners and poor people, while union leaders’ efforts to create a political platform began to converge with social movements forming across the country.

At a meeting in São Paulo on August 18, 1979, former opposition politicians, union leaders, students, intellectuals, and representatives of one hundred social movements discussed the party’s formation. It was launched at the São Judas Tadeo restaurant in São Bernardo that October. The resulting Workers’ Party came to represent these diverse groups, turning the possibility of a broad coalition into an enduring political organization.

Empowerment and democratic change

The book presents the strikes as the beginning of a process of empowerment rather than a single, sudden revolution. The Workers’ Party’s roots in trade unionism were accompanied from early on by efforts from Lula, intellectuals, and opposition politicians to build a broad coalition. As the party took over local governments, it encouraged civic participation and helped change how governance worked in parts of Brazil.

That grassroots organization mattered to the national transition. The movement that had started in factories contributed to Brazil’s shift from military rule to democracy; just as importantly, participation from below helped make the transition a move toward more inclusive political institutions. The account contrasts this path with Venezuela, where a transition to democracy after 1958 did not produce comparable grassroots empowerment or a pluralistic distribution of political power. In Brazil, organized workers and allied social movements helped connect political change to the prospects of public services, educational expansion, and a more level playing field.