12 May 1978: At six o'clock in the morning, three thousand metal-workers at the Scania automotive factory in São Bernardo do Campo arrived for work. They entered the factory as usual, but refused to turn on the machines. The strike was on.
Organized in secret by the workers themselves, the 1978 Scania strike was the first to occur in Brazil in nearly ten years, since the promulgation of the draconian Institutional Act #5 (AI-5) a decade earlier. Its leaders and participants ran the risk of imprisonment, torture, and potentially death at the hands of the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), Brazil's military security police.
The goals of the strike were simple at face value, a 20% salary increase and safer working conditions for Scania's employees, but the calling of an illegal strike in the midst of political oppression was a powerful revolutionary act. Little did the strikers know that their courage that morning would spark a movement that, over the course of several years, would succeed in ending Brazil's dictatorship and bringing democracy, civil rights, and freedom of expression to tens of millions.
Despite enormous advances, however, Brazil still has one of the world's highest rates of social inequality and concentration of wealth. Workers' movements have been able to push Brazilian society in the direction of a European social-democratic model, but they have not been able to solve the more fundamental questions of economic justice.
This diary will examine the political and cultural history from which the late-1970s Brazilian workers' movement arose, and discuss its major successes as well as areas where it fell short of its goals.
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