The 1978 Brazilian metalworkers’ strikes began when workers at a truck factory in São Bernardo put down their tools in protest over the government’s manipulation of inflation figures. The first strike in a wider wave, the action turned a dispute over wages into a political victory for organized labor and helped bring together the social groups pressing to end military rule and renew Brazilian democracy.

The stoppage at São Bernardo

On May 12, 1978, the day at the Scania truck factory in São Bernardo appeared ordinary. But as the 7:00 a.m. shift began, workers laid down their tools. Strikes had been prohibited in Brazil since 1964, when the military overthrew the democratic government of President João Goulart. The immediate spark was news that the government had fixed national inflation figures, understating the increase in the cost of living.

At 8:00 a.m., plant union organizer Gilson Menezes called the union. Its president, thirty-three-year-old activist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, came to the factory by noon. When the company asked him to persuade the workers to return, he refused. That refusal placed the union’s leadership alongside the employees’ action rather than serving as an instrument to end it.

From wages to political action

The Scania stoppage was the first in a wave of strikes that swept across Brazil. Wages were the immediate issue, but the action’s significance exceeded the workplace: Lula later argued that economic and political factors could not be separated, because the struggle for wages also brought the working class a political victory.

That connection mattered in a country where strikes had been banned and military rule had lasted for a decade and a half. The workers’ action demonstrated that people could organize collectively around an economic grievance and, through that organization, contest a political order that restricted participation. It did not by itself end military rule, but it helped reopen space for public action.

Building a broader coalition

The revived labor movement formed part of a wider reaction to military government. In 1973, the left-wing intellectual Fernando Henrique Cardoso argued that democracy would be created by the coming together of the many social groups opposed to the military. The coalition he envisaged included professional associations, unions, churches, student organizations, study groups, debating circles, and social movements.

The Scania strike helped signal and shape that coalition. By late 1978, Lula was proposing a new political party, not solely for trade unionists but for wage earners and poor people more broadly. On August 18, 1979, a meeting in São Paulo brought together former opposition politicians, union leaders, students, intellectuals, and representatives of one hundred social movements that had organized during the 1970s. The Workers’ Party was launched at the São Judas Tadeo restaurant in São Bernardo that October, giving organizational form to a diverse set of groups.

Empowerment and institutional change

The strikes’ longer significance lay in the way workplace mobilization connected with local social movements and broader political organization. The Workers’ Party’s leaders and supporters sought to build a broad coalition; as the party later took over local governments, it encouraged civic participation and contributed to changes in governance across the country.

Brazil’s transition differed from England’s seventeenth-century upheaval and France’s revolution at the turn of the eighteenth century: there was no single radical event that transformed institutions all at once. Instead, the process of empowerment that began in factories such as the one in São Bernardo contributed to national change, including the transition from military rule to democracy. Grassroots organization helped make that transition a move toward more inclusive political institutions, with a government committed to public services, expanded education, and a more level playing field. The strikes were therefore important not simply as a labor dispute, but as an early expression of collective power that could support a wider democratic coalition.