Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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strike broke out at Scania, Lula received a letter from Dona Mocinha that told him that his father, Aristides, had died. Aristides, retired, was living alone and was a shadow of the man who had terrorized his children. He suffered the physical consequences of alcoholism and wasted what money he had on prostitutes. Lula asked his brothers to attend to a funeral, but when they got to Santos they found that Aristides had been buried twelve days earlier as a pauper. Lula's father had had little influence on his career, except that he respected his mother the more for the way she responded to his father's treatment of her, and he was determined to have more to show for his own life.
In July, after the first wave of strikes had been settled, Lula and Marisa had their second son, Sandro Luís. There was no question of paternity leave. Lula was actually fourteen hundred miles away, at a conference of petroleum workers in Salvador, when the baby was born. Lula, Marisa, and their three children were now living together in a small house in Jardim Lavínia, São Bernardo do Campo. It had been bought two years earlier with a loan from the state housing bank. Marisa found it hard to adjust to Lula's heavy travel schedule. The following year she started going to the strike meetings herself.
The strike wave in 1978 had a number of wider consequences, in addition to giving a new direction to the Brazilian labor movement. It was not possible to classify it as a result of foreign intervention by Castroites or by the Brazilian leftist exiles who had been forced abroad after the overthrow of Goulart in 1964. It was not connected to the small groups of armed insurrectionists, now largely killed or rounded up by the military regime. It could not be blamed on agitation by Catholic radicals, members of the communist movement (which had now split into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese wings), or Trotskyites—although all these had contributed. It was predominantly a home-grown, rather unideological rebellion against the compression of wages in the advanced manufacturing sector.24
For this reason it was seen as a threat by employers and their allies in the military government. It challenged the high rates of return on capital in the early years of the Brazilian “miracle,” which had led to an influx of foreign money. The fruits of growth had not been shared with labor because unions had been decapitated and strikes prohibited. Employers and the government had been caught off guard by the sudden upsurge of labor unrest that started at Scania. They resolved to act differently in the future, mobilizing police and other agencies of force. At the same time, the excitement among workers was infectious and beyond the capacity of Lula and other leaders to control.
What happened in 1979 was a great deal rougher. Whereas in 1978 more than 539,000 workers had participated in 24 strikes, the following year more than 3.2 million workers, more than a quarter of them metalworkers in the auto and engineering industries, participated in 113 strikes. The labor struggles, which involved sharp repression by the government and temporary closure of the São Bernardo metalworkers' union, also interweaved with political developments. On 15 March 1979, in a flamboyant ceremony in Brasilia, General Geisel handed over the presidency to the last of the military presidents, Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo. In an extraordinarily ambitious move, Lula had hoped to roll out a general strike to coincide with the handover. It was an example of his own growing confidence, boosted by media interest in what was nicknamed the “trade union republic” of the ABC districts around São Paulo; he himself had now grown a beard to add to his moustache.25
In fact, three days before the change of president, Lula and other union leaders reached a good agreement with the employers' organization in São Paulo, FIESP. This would have given increases of 63 percent to the poorest metalworkers, and 44 percent to the higher paid. But when Lula tried to convince his members to support the deal at a large meeting in a soccer stadium—he stood on a table in the middle and those nearest to him had to pass his message outward, as there were no loudspeakers—they shouted him down. “Strike, strike, strike,” they cried. It was an awkward moment for Lula. “So, we are on strike,” he replied. He warned that it might last a long time.
Employers and state authorities were still unable to produce a coordinated response. The regional labor court (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho)—an instrument of the corporatist labor system—awarded an increase of 44 percent, but declared the strike illegal. FIESP, the employers, offered considerably more. Armed military police broke up a small cordon round the Pirelli factory, and police threw tear gas at workers outside the Volkswagen factory.
Although paid advertisements on radio stations urged the strikers to return to work, the strike stayed solid. Lula told meetings that the whole future of the working class depended on success. His rhetoric was exalted. “We will give our life, if necessary,” he said.26 By 21 March, Lula and two other union leaders had a private meeting with a new minister of labor, Murilo Macedo, and eight employers in São Paulo. Although Lula authorized one of his aides to make an agreement, he did not try to sell it to a mass meeting, which insisted on a continuance of the strike. Cleverly, he asked for a vote of confidence in the executive, but he returned home feeling devastated, and others called him a traitor.27
After that the conflict sharpened. Authorities shut down the São Bernardo union. Lula moved in with his father-in-law. The Catholic Church launched a relief fund for the families of strikers, and put churches at the disposal of the union for meetings. Not permitted to use the Vila Euclides soccer stadium, twenty thousand metalworkers gathered in the Samuel Sabatini square in São Bernardo, also known as the Paço Municipal. They were met by one thousand shock troops, more than a hundred armored cars, and a vehicle firing sand and colored water. The workers stayed put.
The shock troops threw tear gas canisters, which the strikers threw back at them. The mayor and a colonel asked for calm and trust in the authorities. The workers sang the national anthem. They called out Lula's name. The colonel telephoned the head of the military police, and obtained permission to withdraw his forces. The bishop of São Bernardo, Dom Cláudio Hummes, led the gathering in the Lord's prayer, and the crowd dispersed. Dismissed as unimportant by the government, it was a moral victory for the strike and encouraged opposition politicians to criticize the state intervention in the union.
The 1979 strike had not always seen Lula at his best. At one point he was directly warned by the general commanding the Second Army that if he turned up at meetings he would be arrested. He went missing for a few days, and other strike leaders tried to represent him. When a delegation went looking for him he was found at home, playing with his children, and a left-wing actress, Lélia Abramo, told him that he had to turn up at the next assembly and resume his leadership.
The strikes spread beyond São Paulo and beyond the metalworkers. The unions could not afford any strike pay, and there was real hardship. The metalworkers' strike was not called off until 12 May, two months after it had begun. Most of the workers got an increase of 63 percent, with a discount of 50 percent for the days they had not worked, and their promise to put in extra hours in compensation. A mass meeting, at which tears were shed, accepted the agreement and gave unanimous backing to Lula and his executive.28
There was no let-up in conflict in the rest of 1979. One auto firm would fire a worker so that another could take him on at lower pay. The Ministry of Labor intervened in bank workers' unions in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre. When the metalworkers of São Paulo decided in September to go on strike, over the opposition of their president, Joaquim dos Santos Andrade, they were met with violence. Troops broke up picket lines, churches were invaded to disperse union meetings, and strikers were persecuted in their home districts. In one factory gate confrontation, a Catholic union leader was shot dead, strengthening the church's support for workers' rights.
The salary campaign of 1980 for the São Bernardo metalworkers was more bitter still. The perception among the government and employers that Lula was in any sense tractable or nonpolitical had vanished. There was a feeling on both sides that the union movement was challenging the state and the regime. At the same time, the Figueiredo government, launched by Geisel with the hope that it would complete a return to democracy, was running into difficulty. In August 1979, the government had agreed to a political amnesty, and celebrated exiles, such as Leonel Brizola, Goulart's brother-in-law, Miguel Arraes, former governor of Pernambuco, and Luís Carlos Prestes, veteran leader of the pro-Soviet PCB, had returned within a couple of months.
But Figueiredo's hope that he