The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party - PT) and the Brazilian trade union federations used this year’s May Day celebrations to set a political trap for workers and young people in Brazil looking for a way to fight against brutal capitalist exploitation and punishing working hours.
Both in Lula’s national radio and TV address on the eve of May Day and in the rallies organized by the trade union federations, the primary demand was for a reduction in the working day in Brazil from 44 hours to 40 hours a week with no reduction in wages and an end to the 6x1 work schedule (six days on, one off), which is prevalent in the retail and services sectors that operate on weekends.
The fact that this demand went viral on social media at the end of 2023 and has continued to resonate ever since reveals the growing chasm between the working class and the trade unions. Long dominated by discredited pro-capitalist bureaucracies, these organizations are unable to appeal to the workers facing increasing levels of exploitation.
At the end of last year, drugstore attendant Ricardo Azevedo published a video on TikTok denouncing the 6x1 work schedule. It went viral, leading to the creation of the so-called Life Beyond Work Movement (VAT). In last year’s municipal elections, Azevedo received the most votes for councilor for the pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) in Rio de Janeiro.
Facing a declining approval rating amid rising inflation and the impact of his austerity policies, Lula is vocally supporting these popular demands as a means of countering the growing crisis facing his administration. Along with initiatives such as a bill that zeroes out income tax for those earning up to R$5,000 (US$875) a month, he is striving for a better image in advance of next year’s presidential election.
In his speech, Lula said, “We are going to deepen the debate on reducing the current working hours in the country, in which workers spend six days at work and have only one day off.”
At the May Day rally led by Força Sindical – Brazil’s second largest trade union, created in the early 1990s to defend neoliberal policies and “modernize” labor relations – former union bureaucrat and Lula’s Labor Minister Luiz Marinho explained that reducing working hours won’t happen “by magic”.
According to Marinho, “We need to draw the attention of Brazilian businesspeople to the fact that the ones who stand to gain are Brazil and the companies. Improving working conditions, improving the working environment ... helps to improve absenteeism, helps to improve product quality, helps to improve productivity.”
Councilor and VAT leader Azevedo welcomed Lula’s speech on X/Twitter, saying, “The next important step is for the federal government to start acting in Congress, for the government bench to start acting, including for the president of the Lower House [Hugo Motta] to expedite our PEC [Proposed Constitutional Amendment].” On the initiative of federal deputy Erika Hilton, also from PSOL, a bill is being considered in the Brazilian Congress to put an end to the 6x1 work schedule and institute a 36-hour, four-day workweek with no reduction in pay.
The bankrupt perspective uniting Marinho, Azevedo, the PT and PSOL proceeds from the false premise of bourgeois nationalism that workers and employers in Brazil share a common interest, and that reducing working hours and abolishing the 6x1 work schedule can be done in the interests of Brazilian capitalism and “national development”. While covering up the objective character of capitalist exploitation, they also seek to bind workers to the bankrupt bourgeois state and sow illusions that the reactionary Brazilian Congress can be pressured to act in their favor.
Recent studies have highlighted the opposed interests of the working class and capitalism on this question. A study by UNICAMP’s Institute of Economics, reported by Folha de S. Paulo on May 1st, showed that ending the 6x1 work schedule would directly benefit 37 percent of formal workers and, indirectly, 38 percent of informal workers.
On the other hand, according to the report, a different study commissioned by the Minas Gerais industrial federation showed that reducing the workweek from 44 to 36 hours, with four working days and three days of rest, would increase labor costs for companies by 22 percent.
This year’s May Day in Brazil was also marked by a split between the major trade union federations. Since 2019, the first year of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, the CUT (the PT-controlled trade union federation), Força Sindical and five other Brazilian trade union federations have held joint May Day rallies. Lula took part in all of them, paving the way for their unprecedented unanimous support for his candidacy in the 2022 presidential election.
This year, the CUT bureaucracy decided not to take part in the rally led by Força Sindical, claiming disagreement with the format of the event in São Paulo, which, in addition to the presence of popular artists to inflate attendance, featured a raffle for ten cars.
The CUT and Lula, who was also absent from the event, distanced themselves from Força Sindical and the other union federations in Brazil, fearing that this year’s May Day rally could repeat last year’s fiasco. In the 2024 rally, Lula gave a speech to less than two thousand people, the vast majority of them union bureaucrats, on the East Side of São Paulo, a region with “a lot of worker concentration,” as they claimed at the time.
The CUT and its affiliated unions decided to hold a rally in São Bernardo dos Campos, in the industrial ABC region, the political birthplace of the PT. This also gave the CUT an opportunity to openly promote the Lula government, calling on those present to participate in the construction of a digital “national militant network” to disseminate pro-government propaganda.
What lies behind this maneuver is the discrediting of the Brazilian unions, with their long history of collaboration with the companies and the state against the working class. Years of sellout agreements, systematic isolation of strikes and diversion of workers’ struggles into the dead end of the bourgeois courts and the state, have led to a massive slashing of higher-paying jobs and an erosion of workers’ historical conquests.
This historic trend is verified by the latest data. In 2023, the rate of unionization of Brazilian workers fell to 8.4 percent, the lowest level since the beginning of official figures in 2012, when it was 16 percent.
May Day in Brazil also exposed the Brazilian pseudo-left’s call for supposedly “independent” rallies to build a “left opposition” to the Lula government. The main vehicle in this regard was the CSP-Conlutas, the trade union federation controlled by the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), which serves as a hub for various Morenoite, Pabloite and Stalinist political organizations.
At the rally called by CSP-Conlutas on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, PSTU union leader Altino Prazeres, denounced the other trade union federations’ rallies as being “financed by big businessmen.” “At their rally there’s a car raffle financed by those same big businessmen,” he said, “at their rally they want to say amen to all the governments. And not here. Here it’s a ... classist rally.”
This pretense was refuted by the PSTU’s allies in the Revolutionary Workers Movement (MRT), a different Morenoite current affiliated with Argentina’s Socialist Workers Party (PTS). While still claiming that CSP-Conlutas is “the only [trade union] federation that maintains positions of political independence,” they wrote on the Esquerda Diário website that it “is acting in the opposite direction in Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte and other places where it has been defending the construction of a unified rally with the trade union federations, even subordinating itself to government banners in some cases.”
The CSP-Conlutas holding a separate rally follows a distinct political logic: to preserve its role as a “left” buffer for the corporatist trade union apparatus, it must differentiate itself from the most unscrupulous sections of the pro-capitalist bureaucracy.
For its part, the MRT denounces the dirty dealings between CSP-Conlutas and the traditional unions in order to defend its bankrupt perspective that the PSTU-led union must be pressured to adhere to “independent class” politics. Both factions of Morenoism work, each in their own way, to preserve the rule of the discredited nationalist bureaucracies over the Brazilian working class.
In their national-opportunist pact, Esquerda Diário happily ignores the PSTU’s bellicose promotion of the US-NATO imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine and the ever more pro-war stance being developed by the CSP-Conlutas. As reported by the WSWS, the union recently organized a reactionary seminar in alliance with chauvinist and fascistic forces promoting the build-up of Brazil’s military industry amid growing threats of nuclear war.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) insisted in its May Day Online Rally, the process of capitalist globalization of recent decades has both made the attacks of the ruling elites global in character and greatly unified the international working class.
That’s why the solution to the problems facing the Brazilian working class, from exhausting work schedules to the anti-labor reforms and austerity measures of the Lula government, cannot be found in purely national and union struggles, however militant.
The Brazilian working class “must break free from the control of pro-capitalist political parties and trade union bureaucracies,” as David North said in his speech, and “repudiate all varieties of reactionary nationalism.” What is needed is the uniting of workers’ struggles across national boundaries under the banner of international socialism.
This was the program that the ICFI advanced in its May Day rally. We call on Brazilian workers to study the speeches presented and join the Grupo Socialista pela Igualdade (Socialist Equality Group), which is fighting to build the Brazilian section of the ICFI.