During a recent strike of bank workers, a judge of the labor court in the city of Cuiabá in Mato Grosso, western Brazil, had to decide on a preliminary injunction requested by a powerful multinational bank. The company demanded that trade unionists and picketing workers in general should be prohibited from approaching the bank's branches and other premises and, consequently, from organizing pickets to convince fellow workers and prevent them from getting to their workplaces. In a rare decision, the judge denied the employer's request, arguing that,
preventing proximity by the strikers to the bank branches would impede the struggle for better working conditions and wages, insofar as the evident precariousness of employment positions in Brazil does not allow the majority of workers to resist the orders of their employer to ignore the strike … in practice, if there are no trade unionists at the company gates, there are no employees who fail to show up at work.Footnote 1
Going beyond the confines of the current legal battle, the judge's reasoning evokes a longstanding political, academic, and legal debate on the action of pickets in Brazilian strikes. The connections between the workers and their leaders, the mechanisms of decision-making and trade union democracy, the linkages between organizations in the workplace and community associations, and the relationship between trade unionism, political leaders, employers, and police forces, the formal and informal class-built networks, and even the role of violence in strikes are some of the controversial themes that, for several generations, have been geared directly to the debate on pickets in Brazil in the discussions of labor historians.
In this article we analyze the role of pickets in two of the most emblematic strikes in the history of the Brazilian workers' movement in the twentieth century, the “strike of the 400,000,” which involved several industrial sectors in São Paulo and neighboring cities in 1957 and the “forty-one days strike,” involving the metalworkers of the industrial belt known as ABC Paulista, in the metropolitan region of the city of São Paulo in 1980.
Both strikes occurred at a time of profound reconfiguration of Brazilian society, between 1950 and 1980, marked by industrialization, migration, and urbanization. Over that period, the proportion of the economically active population engaged in agriculture fell by half. Approximately thirty-five million people left the rural areas and headed, above all, to the metropolitan areas of major cities of the center-south of the country, the largest of which was São Paulo.Footnote 2 Although separated by a period of almost twenty-five years, both the “strike of the 400,000” (1957) and the “forty-one days strike” (1980) reveal important aspects of the performance of workers in that crucial period of Brazilian history.
Moreover, these two major stoppages have become emblematic paradigms of the forms of trade union action sustained not only by the trade unionism of the “national-reformist” and communist blocs, hegemonic within Brazilian labor in the period preceding the 1964 civil-military coup, but equally by the “new unionism” that emerged at the end of the 1970s, and that was organized around the Workers' Party (PT) and the Trade Union Confederation (CUT). Despite their chronological distance and political differences, a detailed analysis of these strikes shows definite similarities between the two movements. The actions of pickets, in particular, but also the organization of the workers at the workplace and in the neighborhoods, and the strikers' rituals and performances are examples of some of these analogies, indicating a more permanent and durable organizational repertoire than the specialized bibliography and the speeches of political and union leaders would suggest.
For years, much of the literature on trade unionism in Brazil was marked by the weight of the 1964 coup, which it saw as marking the moment of a fundamental cleavage in the trajectory of the workers' movement. The emergence of the so-called “new unionism” and its impressive share of followers by the end of the 1970s accentuated even more the idea of a supposed “rupture” and the discontinuities between the pre- and post-military regime trade union movements. Thus, trade unionism prior to 1964 was strongly characterized, in a large part of the academic and trade union narratives, as “old,” “populist,” dependent on the State and poorly organized at the base, being active only in traditional sectors of the economy and fragile in the most modern and advanced areas.
That characterization, which radically opposed a “new” to an “old” unionism has been questioned and, to a large extent, dismantled by several authors since the end of the 1990s.Footnote 3 However, there is still a long way to go and much research to be done in examining the continuities and discontinuities in trade union practices and the organizational forms of workers in those two periods, while taking into account their important political, economic, and social differences.
The dominant tradition of studies on strikes in the historiography of Brazilian labor has focused on monographic analyses of specific work stoppages or on those that took place in relatively short periods of time considered to be historically homogeneous. There are few comparative analyses between strikes, and studies on strike processes of long duration are still rare.Footnote 4 Recent studies on the role of the Labor Courts have revealed interesting clues to understanding strike negotiation processes, including a broader view of long-term trends.Footnote 5 In addition, we still know very little about the continuity or changes in the organization and mobilization processes behind the work stoppages, the geography of the strikes, their spatial dynamics, or their relations to the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the occupation of public space. As we shall see, dense diachronic and comparative studies of strikes can be highly revealing of continued and surprising practices in labor culture, in spite of the time gap that separates them and their very different circumstances.
The “Strike of the 400,000,” São Paulo, 1957
One of the most famous and important workers' movements in the democratic interval between the end of the Getúlio VargasFootnote 6 dictatorship in 1945 and the civil-military coup d'état in 1964, the strike of October 1957, or the “strike of the 400,000,” as it became known, involved several industrial sectors in São Paulo and other neighboring regions. For a long time this strike was considered by most scholars of the labor movement as a standoff, emblematic of a supposedly “populist” trade unionism, fragile in its rank-and-file organization and excessively linked to the dominant political interests and state institutions.Footnote 7 More recent studies, however, have been radically altering this evaluation of the work stoppage and have revealed a movement with connections much more complex and dynamic among workers, trade union leaders, and political leaders.Footnote 8 In any case, in all these diverse interpretations, the prominent role played by pickets during the “strike of the 400,000” is one of the key points of the various analyses.
The workers' protest occurred at a very unusual juncture. Inspired by the developmentalist policies of the Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) government, the country was passing through intense economic and social transformations. A government program that promised accelerated economic growth—“fifty years in five”—prompted rapid industrialization and the massive entry of foreign capital, particularly in the automobile manufacturing sector.
The construction, in record time, of a new capital for the country, Brasília, and the emergence and international impact of cultural phenomena such as the “Bossa Nova,” along with the popular excitement over the first Brazilian victory in the World Cup soccer competition in Sweden in 1958, comprised a scenario that strongly favored the optimism of the official discourse. To many, it seemed that the promise of a “country of the future,” which had accompanied Brazil for several generations, was about to come true.Footnote 9
The metropolitan region of São Paulo was one of the most affected by this contradictory process. It was there that the greater part of the new and modern industrial sector was installed. Driven by an intense migration of rural workers (the vast majority of whom came from the interior of the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and in particular, the Northeast of the country), the city and the industrial belt in the adjacent municipalities grew at an unprecedented pace, reinforcing the proud slogans of the local elite that São Paulo was “the capital of work” and “the city that can never be stopped.”
However, if the supply of jobs increased, the same was not necessarily true of wages. In fact, the changes in the industrial and technological base also figured in the crisis of several traditional sectors, such as the textile industry, a large employer of women. The abundant supply of labor contributed to the relative compression of wages, despite the visible development underway. Besides that, there was a general complaint about the increased rhythm of work processes causing stress and accidents and a clear perception of overexploitation. The intense growth of São Paulo relied on a strong social segregation in the city. Increasingly, the middle and upper classes lived in the most central and well-equipped neighborhoods while the poor, in general, were displaced to shantytowns in the vast periphery. Real estate speculation, inadequate transportation and urban infrastructure clearly came to be the common experience of the great majority São Paulo's working population.Footnote 10
But at the end of the 1950s it was the cost of living, above all, that created the greatest dissatisfaction among workers. The inflationary effects of government economic policy and its impact on wages were recognized even by the industrialists and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The months prior to the strike were filled with intense agitation among the working classes of São Paulo. Trade unionism was in a phase of visible enthusiasm and reorganization. The general strike of textile workers, metalworkers, and those in other industrial sectors in 1953, organized in large measure by the rank and file, had given a new impetus to the movement's most seasoned sectors.Footnote 11 Added to that, the relative liberalization of restrictions on trade union militancy implemented in the second government of Getulio Vargas (1951–1954) continued during Kubitschek's time in office. That created a wider margin of freedom for the actions of activists, at least in the trade unions, given that the joint action of the notorious political and social police, the DOPS, and most of the entrepreneurs and managers kept factory despotism at dictatorial levels in the workplace.
Thus, the trade union movement was gaining space in public life. Soon after the 1953 strike, the Inter-union Unity Pact (PUI) was created, bringing together the majority of the more combative trade unions of the period. An alliance was consolidated between the trade union leaders connected to the Communist Party (PCB), then illegal, but very active in the factories and neighborhoods, and trade unionists tied to the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) with its Vargas-linked origins and, at that moment, increasingly identified with the figure of Vice President João Goulart. However, the political presence of labor leaders without ties to those parties or who were allied with other politicians, as in the case of the governor of São Paulo, Jânio Quadros (1955–1959), was significant. In addition to the defense of the workers' interests, nationalism and anti-imperialism permeated the discourse that held such broad alliances together inside the PUI.
It was against that background that the PUI convened a meeting on October 3, 1957, of São Paulo trade unions representing workers in the textile, metal, printing, spinning and weaving, tanning, and paper industries, among others, who had decided to join forces and to demand a 45 percent wage increase, in addition to calling for concrete measures to control prices and the soaring cost of living.Footnote 12
The employers refused to negotiate, creating even greater dissatisfaction among trade unionists and workers. Gatherings, marches, and meetings in factories and neighborhoods were convened, generating an atmosphere of growing mobilization that culminated with the outbreak of a strike on October 15. From the outset in the early hours of that day, the strike reached huge proportions, paralyzing virtually the entire state capital and hundreds of industries in the so-called ABC region, the industrial belt just outside the city of São Paulo, as well as in several cities in the interior of the state of São Paulo. Huge picket lines, some consisting of thousands of workers, ensured the effectiveness of the movement along the major industrial corridors of the city and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, convinced more workers to join.
The pickets took over São Paulo during those days. Initially organized by trade unionists and leaders at the workplaces, they quickly multiplied, supported by informal solidarity networks of friendship and neighborliness. With each factory that shut down, rather than dispersing, the workers preferred to stay and strengthen the picket line. The effect of these demonstrations was powerful, enhancing the solidarity and the safety of workers and providing a defense against police repression. “I thought I should go on strike to accompany my workmates. It is not decent for a worker, seeing his colleagues making great sacrifices, to fail to collaborate,” explained a young worker who joined to the movement soon after the creation of a picket line.Footnote 13
Such massive participation far exceeded the most optimistic forecasts of the trade unionists themselves. On October 16, the work stoppage expanded further and the movement took on the air of a true popular rebellion, escaping, in part, from the control of the labor unions. Not just the workers on strike, but the population in general took control of the streets, protesting against their living conditions. The relatively peaceful environment of the previous day was replaced by scenes of violence. Factories were damaged and clashes between companies' security guards and the demonstrators resulted in more than fifty wounded.
The dimensions that the strike had acquired frightened the trade union leaders themselves. The PUI was compelled to launch a manifesto condemning the violence committed, while at the same time taking measures to calm down and control the movement. Pressed by businessmen and by the federal government, the governor, Jânio Quadros, modified his initial position of not repressing the strike. The visible police presence starting on the third day had not cooled down the work stoppage, which continued with high rates of participation, but it certainly was a decisive factor in decreasing the depredations and violent incidents at factory gates. The pickets continued to have a decisive effect, but they started to be monitored more closely by trade unions that repeatedly called for calm and asked that workers avoid provoking clashes with the police and the bosses. In any case, the disposition of the workers was also reaffirmed in large assemblies in the Mooca district stadium. With the streets heavily patrolled but the strike continuing unabated, they nullified in practice the argument of the business sector that the strike took place only due to the absence of the police.
Even though they were a commonly used form of action in Brazil during work stoppages, the large number of pickets and degree of participation of workers in their activities during the “strike of the 400,000” left a strong impression upon their contemporaries. Even conservative sectors recognized the strategic role that the pickets had played in the success of the strike. Evaluating the first day of the strike, the traditional newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, for example, stated that “the action of pickets during the strike is increasingly efficient and, in 90 percent of the cases, their presence leads to work stoppages.” The US consul had recognized that the stoppage was “extremely well organized,” thanks to the action of pickets. The employers' federation itself (FIESP) did not deny that a large number of the “associated companies' were prevented from operating “because of pickets.”Footnote 14 The workers' leaders, of course, also highlighted the action of pickets as being responsible for the success of the work stoppage. Antonio Chamorro, a leading communist weaver, in his speech on the closing day of the movement, celebrated the “work of pickets, the strike's great weapon.”Footnote 15
For the business sectors, however, recognition of the power of pickets took the form of characterizing them as a violent form of action alien to the common worker. The pickets, they declared, were led by “trouble makers” and encouraged by “political demagogues,” forcing law-abiding laborers to join the movement. Distinguishing the picketers from the “real” workers was the repeated discourse of business leaders. Antonio Devisate, FIESP president, in a letter addressed to the governor of the State, and emblematic in that sense, put it this way: “Unfortunately, groups of agitators traverse the industrial neighborhoods trying to stimulate invasions of factories, depredations and other violence, and by fear and coercion are forcing workers to abandon their tasks.”Footnote 16
In any event, the stalemate in negotiations between employers and workers could only be resolved with the intervention of the Regional Labor Court (TRT). On October 24, the tenth day of the stoppage, the TRT had awarded a 25 percent salary readjustment to the strikers. Gathered in assembly in Roosevelt Square, the laborers enthusiastically approved an end to the strike and paraded through the streets of downtown São Paulo celebrating the victory. The months of November and December, however, would see a wave of strikes at some companies against layoffs motivated by the shutdown and to protest nonpayment of the raise. In January 1958, the Higher Labor Court of Appeal would align itself with the industrialists and reduce the adjustment to 18 percent. Despite various protests, a new general strike of workers was not convened, and the fight for salary increases was now concentrated in each industry.
A large part of the strength and impact of the “strike of the 400,000” was due to the support that it managed to elicit from society at large. Diverse student, community, and neighborhood associations, among others, expressed their solidarity and recognized the legitimacy of the workers' claims. The sympathy of the population in general was also evident in activities that included sending food to the pickets. Demonstrations of support for the strikers, like the parade of students and workers in the city center on October 23, were also common during the work stoppage. Singing the national anthem and carrying a huge Brazilian flag, the demonstrators collected contributions and donations for the striking workers.
The political moment also favored the strikers. Central actors in public life and in electoral settings, the workers and their unions were courted by various political forces. The principal local political leaders, the governor, Jânio Quadros, and the mayor, Adhemar de Barros (1957–1961), both with presidential aspirations, competed for the sympathy of the workers' vote and found different ways of supporting the strike. The federal government of President Juscelino Kubitscheck, although concerned about the impact of the strike movement, maintained an ambiguous posture, but it also sought not to transmit an image of open hostility to workers and their leaders. João Goulart, the vice president and Labor Party leader, came to express his support for the demands. It was a time in which almost no politician, out of fear, demagoguery, or ideological reasons, dared to be openly against a workers' demonstration of that size. Many, in fact, came to participate in picket lines themselves, as in the famous case of the Alpargatas factory, mentioned below.
“Union Pickets,” “Natural Pickets,” and “Monster Pickets” in 1957
Interviewed by a sociologist in November of 1958, about a year after the “strike of the 400,000,” a metalworker activist summarized the daily life of the protest and the importance of pickets for the success of the strike. Generally, he recalled, the pickets “were led by worker delegates to the union … The delegate served as a connecting element between workers and the trade unions.” Based on the information given by the militant, the interviewer concluded that “the total set of pickets was comprised of people who had already known each other for a long time. It was the condition which maintained cohesion both in discipline and in uniformity.”Footnote 17
However, this supposedly disciplined working-class organization did not have any way to account for the size of a strike as extensive and widespread, both in geographical terms and in the coverage of industrial sectors and categories of workers involved. Thus, the presence of “spontaneous” or “volunteer” picketers must have played a central role in the dynamics of the movement. Convened, most of the time, in collective manifestations of the strike, such as assemblies, marches, or agglomerations at factory gates, these workers joined the pickets organized by trade unions or formed new picket lines. They spread throughout the industrial corridors of the city, winning new adherents to the strike and pickets, occupying the public spaces, and ensuring the maintenance of a massive strike for several days on end.
Several studies now demonstrate that the trade union movement, during the 1950s and early 1960s, had built a reasonable network of worker organizations within the factories. Despite the limitations imposed by labor legislation (largely designed precisely to avoid any organization of this kind) and the strong repression by employers, widely supported by constant and detailed police surveillance, various trade unions had been effective in the organization of contacts and trade union structures inside the workplace. In their great majority, those forms of worker organizations were informal and clandestine, but they played a decisive role in favoring the greater democratization of union life. Behind the outbreak of the movements for collective action was the drive of such organizations that, in large measure, guaranteed the start, the sustenance, and the support of the workers' movement.
Trade union delegates, company and wages committees, local union leaders, or their rank-and-file substitutes more closely associated with the sphere of the factory floor, had fulfilled the task of forming the connection between the interior of the factories and the trade union leadership. They were references for the other workers, disseminating, on the one hand, information on union activities, and on the other, serving the trade union leaderships as a kind of “barometer” of the climate of their base in the daily life of companies.
In strikes of the period and, in particular in the “strike of the 400,000,” these were workers who had been leading and organizing the pickets. Several of these core groups worked out of the head offices of unions, enlisting their closest colleagues, first in the factories where the trade unions were more organized and more prone to strike. Then they moved on through the industrial belts of the city, where they also succeeded in paralyzing work. Quickly, the pickets had become major public events, with the presence of thousands of workers on the streets, wandering through all the regions where workers could be found. “Like hundreds of fuses lit at the same time, the strikers' movement spread quickly, reaching all the [industrial] neighborhoods,” exulted the Communist newspaper Notícias de Hoje on the second day of the strike.Footnote 18
For the workers in a city with the dimensions of São Paulo, the pickets also served as a guarantee that the strike would go on and that one could join without running the risk of being isolated or that only the factory where one worked would have its activities brought to a standstill and consequently, would be the only one to suffer the employer's probable reprisals. Furthermore, on the picket lines, in assemblies and demonstrations on the streets, the lone workers could feel that they were participating in a collectivity, thereby expanding their sense of common identity. The pickets functioned as a kind of collective “camouflage” that protected individual workers from reprisals for having joined the movement. Even a contemporary analyst, incredulous at the degree of class consciousness among the São Paulo workers, acknowledged that during the strike in 1957, “[t]he allegation [by workers] of not coming to work to avoid ‘problems’ [with the trade unions and the pickets] was, in part, an excuse that they gave to their bosses to enable them to participate in the strike movement.”Footnote 19
Certainly, the absence of police repression in the first days of the strike contributed to the widespread geographical expansion of work stoppages in such a short time. It also facilitated the proliferation of pickets that reached beyond the mechanisms of organization created by the trade unions. In the language of the worker leadership of the period, from a given moment the pickets were not limited only to those of the “union,” but “natural” pickets began to appear spontaneously. According to him, “in the course of the strike, things changed and it was the volunteers that predominated … There were dozens of such [natural] pickets, and they were the more effective kind, they were the ones that informed us about the growth or decline in the numbers of strikers.”Footnote 20
In 1957, there was a clearly established pattern of picket organization, which formed initially among the trade union leaderships, their representatives in the factories and among the groups of workers closest to the union. But it quickly reached an impressive dimension and a level of voluntary participation that often amazed and frightened their own union and political leaders, especially from the second day of the movement, when the strike took on airs of popular rebellion and episodes of violence had become more common.
The informal contacts among the workers themselves fulfilled a fundamental role in the expansion of pickets. As emphasized by a leader of the Glassblowers union, in most cases “it was the first time” that these workers participated in a picket. “Sometimes,” continued the trade unionist,
there were amusing incidents: we cautioned them to ensure that the employees were calm, but some acted as if they were the state Governor. They would tell the bosses to their faces: “you have to close.” Most of them were already known to the union; some not. They were introduced by fellow factory workers: “Look, this guy here, everybody in our factory knows him.” So we accepted the guy.Footnote 21
In addition to the factories and workplaces, the strike was also articulated in low-income neighborhoods and in the urban fabric of the city at large. Amateur soccer clubs, residents' associations, and varied social movements were important informal spaces of support that facilitated the exchange of information, and even organization of the movement and the pickets. Relations of friendship, kinship, neighborhood, being from the same region of the country, were driven by workers who saw the strike as a powerful form of protest against the situation of exploitation in companies, the low wages, and high cost of living and also against the social and urban segregation, daily lived in by thousands and thousands of workers.
Not always, however, did the act of picketing result in membership and active participation of workers. Many managers and bosses were persuaded to release the workers to avoid confusion or clashes with the strikers. In many companies where the union presence was small, it was often only the power of intimidation of the pickets that forced the shutdown of activities. Coerced and forced by the crowd, employees desiring to turn up at their jobs backed off, and very often bosses realized that it was better to halt production in order to avoid even bigger losses.
That was the case, for example, in the São Caetano Ceramics factory that employed the then young worker José de Souza Martins, who years later would become a well-known professor of sociology at the prestigious University of São Paulo. In his autobiography, Martins recalls the picket lines at the factory gates during the strike of 1957: “a crowd shouting” invading the factory. “In a few minutes,” he recalled, “that immense mass was inside, running through the internal passages and addressing the different sections, stopping everything and expelling the workers to the outside.” Terrified, the company engineers ran “to the invaded sections and advised the workers to leave peacefully … Soon the factory was empty and silent,” concluded Martins.Footnote 22
However, many industrialists and factory managers, as well as laborers who for various reasons did not want to strike, decided to resist the onslaught of pickets. This was one of the most common scenarios of conflicts and violence during the strike in 1957, particularly in its early days. Varied clashes with private guards of companies or even with the owners themselves were reported in the press. Pickets were received with gunfire in many factories, and strikers were even actually shot in several of these incidents, stirring more tension and a sense of uncontrolled violence.Footnote 23
The dissemination of “natural” pickets, with the participation of the populace at large, which evidently went beyond the number of workers on strike, gave the impression that the city had been taken over by the strikers and that, at least in those days, for many workers the “world was turned upside down,” allowing them go to employers with their demands, “as if they were the state Governor.” In that context, scenes of violence were not uncommon. The US consulate reported, with evident prejudice, a scenario of a situation out of control and, despite the exaggeration, the description gives us a good idea of the predominant perceptions of the conduct of the strike:
Rocks were thrown, windows and equipment broken, and numerous persons hurt … Cases were reported in which management representatives were the aggressors, but once the violence started the situation rapidly got out of control. The strikers were joined by hoodlums, the jobless, small boys, and riff raff, many of whom joined the fray for pleasure. Much drinking of the Brazilian raw rum “cachaça” was in evidence. Several of these mobsters, queried by the labor officer's contacts, stated that they did not belong to a union … In several cases the pickets grew to mass proportions and hysteria took its logical course.Footnote 24
The measures taken by trade union leaders, from the third day of standstill on, trying to contain the more exalted emotions and controlling the proliferation of “natural” pickets, through the identification of picketers by means of an identification card, responded not only to government and police pressure, but also indicated that they, too, had been surprised by the dimension the strike had taken on. The violent actions, which mainly occurred on the second day of the strike, appeared to exceed the limits permitted by the leaders and trade union activists. An experienced metalworker picketer said that, in those troubled days, “the biggest difficulty was to make the new elements recognize the peaceful character of the movement, because otherwise there would be the possibility of police intervention, which undermined the cohesion and unity of the group, with the dispersion of many members.”Footnote 25
In addition to encouraging police repression, the violence of the strikers was questioning the official discourse of the leaders of a just and peaceful strike. It also put at risk the very legitimacy of the stoppage and the wide range of support carefully put together by trade unionists together with the civil society, media, and political sectors of the government itself.
If the “pacific character” of the strike movement was again repeated in public discourse of the leaders and labor activists, a certain degree of violence and intimidation were accepted and certainly expected in the daily life of the strike, in particular in the actions of pickets. On the one hand, the violent action was consented to by the strikers and considered a just reaction to the constant oppressive violence of the police, which was systematically supported and encouraged by their employers in the “business-police alliance,” an expression of Antonio Luigi Negro.Footnote 26 On the other hand, a situation of moderate violence on the part of pickets could motivate workers in the factories to stop their activities, using as justification the fear of the strikers' actions. In this sense, the testimony of a trade union leader of that period on the action of pickets is instructive:
It was a whole group of people walking down the street, … forming a picket line. They tossed a rock in the first company, threw a stone there that broke in and almost hit the owner on the head … The group inside was crazy to get away from there because they [the bosses] didn't want to give us a raise. Everybody left. The workers gave thanks to God when they [the picketers] arrived in the company and they made everybody get out. Either get out or get beaten up (laughter).Footnote 27
Violence as moral punishment against the strike breaker was also disseminated, and its moderate use was implicitly admitted as one of the functions of pickets. The US consul noted that in “several cases … women were shorn and their heads painted with tar for refusing to leave their jobs.” A police report tells a quite similar story in the working-class district of São Miguel Paulista:
Striking picketers committed acts of violence against the so-called “strike-breakers,” aiming preferably at workers who they squirted with tubes of red ink or maybe iodine or mercurochrome … some pickets attempted to tar the hair of the female “strike breakers.”Footnote 28
A curious story of a metalworker activist, identified by the interviewer, at the end of 1958, as “Blondie” is quite significant and shows that moderate violence of a moral and punitive nature could not only be tolerated, but also have an “educational” role. Interviewed together with another colleague who declared (at least in front of the interviewer) that he disagreed with the violent action undertaken by pickets against strikebreakers, Blondie retorted that “with some fellow strikers there's no point in arguing, only force could settle such cases.” As an example, he told an amusing story about his own sister-in-law, a worker who had never participated in any strike. As he told it,
She is one of these Portuguese people who only want to have enough money to buy their little house. When the others went on strike, she went to work and was earning twice as much. It was no use arguing with her. One day, some of her companions caught her at the exit and gave her a beating with an umbrella. She was so frightened of everything after that. Nowadays, when a strike breaks out she is the first to stop.
And Blondie concluded that, “therefore, with people like that, only force works.”Footnote 29
If the selective and moderate violence could be accepted, although seldom spoken about, it was the image of unity and cohesion of the working class that the trade union leaders sought to associate with the picket lines. The so-called “monster pickets” were opportunities to reaffirm the public presence of workers and demonstrate the strength of the strike. Often, organized after large workers' assemblies, the monster pickets in general had a festive character, gathering thousands of workers in a sort of “carnival of the strike,” producing a powerful ritual effect of permanent public manifestation. A “picket leader,” remembering a little of what it was like, pointed out that, in one of the “three monster pickets” organized by the glassblowers union, thousands of workers gathered in front of two of the largest glass factories in the city, “the Santa Marina and Vidrobras”: “Then, we took the flag of the Glassblowers Federation, a beautiful, big, red flag. We paraded it in front of the factories and we spent three hours talking … that was a really beautiful picket.”Footnote 30
In most cases, the monster pickets were specially prepared to affect specific companies. Large factories that for some reason had not yet stopped their activities, industries owned by representatives of industrialists, and/or widely recognized for bad working conditions or employer despotism were frequent targets of these pickets.
A case that has become legendary was the monster picket organized on October 22 in the neighborhood of Mooca after a large general assembly of the various categories of workers on strike. Around fifteen thousand workers walked through the streets of the neighborhood and went to the textile factory São Paulo Alpargatas, considered by trade unionists as having always been “an inveterate bastion of the employers in all strikes.”Footnote 31 Having Vice Governor Porfirio da Paz and several other politicians in the front line of the picket, the trade union leaders managed to convince the management of the company to suspend production and release the laborers and workers, who were received with irrepressible enthusiasm by the crowd at the factory gates.Footnote 32
In 1957, the monster pickets were also an opportunity both for the trade unionists to demonstrate their ability to raise political support and for several public authorities and political figures to show a supposed involvement with the workers and their struggles. In addition to undermining the momentum of police and employer repression, the presence of local city council members and even a vice governor in activities of the strikers had helped give respectability to the movement and reinforced the discourse of the trade union about orderly, peaceful, and just strikes. Furthermore, large support from politicians and representatives of civil society gave legitimacy to a strike about to be judged in the labor court. The pickets also became an important space for political visibility with wide repercussions. In a scenario in which various forces jostled fiercely for the workers' vote, the strike (and its visible expression in the streets, the pickets) was a decisive moment of politicization and presence of workers in the public arena.
The “Forty-One Days Strike” of the ABC Paulista Metalworkers, 1980
The strike undertaken in 1980 by metalworkers of the ABC Paulista, a manufacturing area of the metropolitan region of São Paulo that concentrated, at that time, almost all the Brazilian automobile industry,Footnote 33 has been understood in the last thirty years to have been one of the most important demonstrations of the Brazilian proletariat ever. This evaluation has been strengthened in the last decade, since the cycle of metalworkers' strikes in the 1978–1980 period has been repeatedly identified as having been of enormous importance in the construction of contemporary Brazilian democracy not only because the strikes composed a dramatic episode of the fight to put an end to the military regime (1964–1985) in Brazil, but also because they signaled the beginning of the public rise of Luiz Inacio da Silva, or Lula. The strike is seen as the first step in the process leading Lula, then the president of the São Bernardo do Campo Metalworkers Union and principal leader of the strikes, in 1980, to his victory 2002 in the presidential elections. It is not surprising, therefore, that the strike of 1980, alongside those in 1978 and 1979, from immediately after the events on, became the object of an avalanche of academic studies, which constitute a vast and diverse bibliography.
After the civil/military coup of 1964, a pattern of capitalist accumulation was implanted in Brazil that, between the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, resulted in a period of great growth of the economy—on average, 11 percent a year—referred to as “the Brazilian miracle.” This economic model, dependent on foreign capital, presupposed a climate that was attractive to it. In this sense, the military implemented, in addition to changes in labor laws and repression/bureaucratization of the trade unions, legislation to control the strikes and wages that were readjusted according to doctored federal government-determined indices. As a result, workers' salaries suffered real reductions throughout the period of the military regime.Footnote 34
Furthermore, in keeping with the consolidation of a consumer durable goods market that was fostered by the government's economic strategy, there was a strong concentration of income in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the upper-middle-class strata of society.Footnote 35 Complementing that context so eminently hostile to the workers, authoritarianism in the institutional sphere was also present at the workplace level, subjecting the proletariat to an increase in the pace/volume of work, to high turnover rates in employment, the despotism of the managers, and inadequate health and safety standards.Footnote 36 Those conditions fostered extraordinary numbers, such as the 1,330,523 work accidents officially registered in the country in 1971.Footnote 37
From the mid-1970s, the economic model began to show signs of exhaustion. The growth rates declined, the external debt had risen to unsustainable limits, and the foreign exchange reserves were drastically reduced, especially in the light of the disequilibrium of the balance of payments. In addition, the terms of world currency exchange deteriorated quickly, to the detriment of Brazil, and inflation increased at a rapid pace (reaching 110 percent in 1980).Footnote 38
Pressed by the economic crisis and the growing demands for democratization stemming from various sectors of civil society, the military regime, in spite of internal opposition within the armed forces, began a process of controlled political liberalization, which would be known as “the opening” (abertura). In this slightly expanded public space, social movements intensified their actions. It was in that context that the 1978—1980 cycles of metalworkers' strikes took place, accelerating the crisis of the military regime and having a decisive influence on the trajectory of the political transition. The workers even managed to impose their own agenda, emphasizing social rights among others. They also took on the fight for the democratization of the country, undermining the political arrangements that were shaped during “the opening” process that had, until then, ignored the proletariat altogether.Footnote 39
When, in 1978, the metalworkers of São Bernardo do Campo folded their arms in front of their machines and refused to work, they broke through a decade of silence imposed by force on the Brazilian working class and opened the way for thousands of strikes throughout the country. It is true that, in previous years, numerous mobilizations had been undertaken by other workers in their workplaces. They never attained, however, the scale and visibility achieved by the strikes of 1978, 1979, and particularly the strike of 1980. This last took on airs of an open confrontation with the authoritarian regime, attracting, therefore, broad support from other social sectors that were in favor of democratization.
On April 1, 1980, 300,000 metalworkers of the ABC Paulista and some cities in the interior of the state of São Paulo went on strike demanding a wage increase of 7 percent for productivity and job security for twelve months. During forty-one days, they resisted the widespread repression that was launched against them by employers and by the military regime. During the period of the strike, the collective mobilization of workers spread quickly outward through the urban space of Greater São Paulo.Footnote 40 Expelled from factories and from important public spaces, the metalworkers maintained the strike mostly from the neighborhoods in which they resided, by politicizing the spaces and relations of their daily lives. Thus, they redefined the geography of collective mobilization.Footnote 41
Just like the “strike of the 400,000” and other major stoppages in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, in the second half of the twentieth century, during the “forty-one days strike” the action of pickets proved to be decisive, attracting multiple views and interpretations. In general, the press, when it sought to characterize and define the role of pickets in mobilizing the working class, put forward varied and changing views. A Vanguarda, a local newspaper that adopted an ambivalent position toward the “forty-one days strike,” gives us some idea of the varied tones adopted. In the first days of the strike, clearly supporting the movement, A Vanguarda stated that, “the strike continues, in a peaceful and orderly manner; without pickets at the beginning, with pickets since yesterday.”Footnote 42 It suggested, therefore, a certain harmony between workers on strike and pickets. The picket action did not affect the strike's character of a “peaceful and orderly” movement. Two weeks later, criticizing the noncompliance with the decision of the Regional Labor Court (TRT) which had decreed the illegality of the movement, A Vanguarda changed its position and concluded, “With pickets, the strike has become imposed.” By means of pickets, “leaders of the movement” were seen to be imposing the strike, “taking advantage of the ignorance of the masses.”Footnote 43 In that way, it suggested the existence of an antagonism between workers on strike and picketers. In the following week, admitting that the “government authorities” had gone too far in their efforts to repress the movement, A Vanguarda described the actions of workers to sustain the strike, including the pickets, as an “attitude of defense.” At that point, therefore, the pickets, even if they were infiltrated by “leftists,”Footnote 44 were presented as one of the elements of the resistance of the striking workers to the harsh government repression that was launched against them. Once again, then, the harmony between pickets and workers on strike is suggested. Finally, in the last days of the strike, A Vanguarda reported that the pickets were still active and opened space for leaders of the “forty-one days strike” to attribute episodes of worker violence to the police infiltrated among the strikers.Footnote 45
The leaders of the strike characterized the strikers as “peaceful and law-abiding.” Thus, in general meetings, the leaders avoided open public talk about the pickets; but, in more private meetings, they promoted and organized pickets and conceded that the pickets were needed for mobilizing workers. By attributing to the pickets the role of containing the strike-breakers, against whom a moderate degree of physical violence was allowed, the pickets came to be seen as key to the success of the strike.Footnote 46
The police authorities, in turn, varied in their interpretations. In principle, the pickets were seen by the police as well as by representatives of federal and state governmentsFootnote 47 as one of the ways by which the “Marxist political schools of thought” could infiltrate the metalworkers strike, thereby manipulating it.Footnote 48 However, given the inadequacy of this explanation in the face of the massive evidence of pickets being organized on the initiative of the workers themselves, the police authorities started to say that the picketers were naive, “the unsuspecting” among the workers, who allowed themselves to be led astray by recommendations of irresponsible strike leaders.Footnote 49
If for some workers the picket line was a privileged way of engaging in collective mobilization, for many others, it was seen as an important shield, one that “explained” absence from work in the face of threats and pressures from the State or bosses, so that they could participate in the strike without being identified as undesirable “strikers.” Thus, in the first three weeks of the strike, by means of simple “persuasion” and “social invitation,” it was not unusual for pickets composed of less than a dozen workers to deter hundreds of workers from the normal exercise of their activities.Footnote 50
Those actions are more understandable when we bear in mind that, in the strike of 1980, the clash between the State and employers, on one hand, and workers, on the other, took place against the background of a situation in which the former had resources that allowed them to exert strong pressure and threaten the latter. In spite of its oscillations, the State, acting under the aegis of comprehensive authoritarian legislation, still tended to treat strikes as crimes. Employers were not far behind: They often expelled workers from the factories and called in the police so that in full public view, wielding truncheons and revolvers, the “forces of order” could make the distinction between “strikers” and “workers” so feared by many workers because of the punishments that it justified.Footnote 51 The actions of pickets constantly and insistently attempted to blur that distinction. Therefore, even though they had strike breakers as specific targets of their own, the pickets effectively hampered the efforts of the State and capitalists to label them as “strikers,” with all the consequences associated with that classification of all those that adhered to the solid bloc of the metalworkers' movement.
The tacit relationship between picketers and other strikers cannot be generalized to embrace all of the metalworkers, nor the entire long strike of 1980. In several episodes, workers simply felt coerced by picketers. From April 30 on, for example, when many of the workers, threatened with the possibility of dismissal due to a questionable interpretation of labor legislation on the part of their bosses, decided that it was time to return to work,Footnote 52 the picketers intensified their actions by provoking various conflicts. In this sense, while it was true that the pickets were fomenting the worker mobilization, it did not mean that they were exempt from disagreements, misunderstandings, or excesses that are inherent in any kind of collective mobilization and even more so in complex class formation processes. But for the most part, they had the important role of weighing the threats and pressures of State and bosses,Footnote 53 opening up spaces in which the workers, based on a constant (re)evaluation of the circumstantial balance of forces in play, could resolve and assert their choices as to whether to return to work or remain on strike.
Under this complex and powerful set of pressures, the metalworkers of the ABC Paulista brought work to a standstill for forty-one days and imposed colossal damages on the companies. According to the National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers, the time lost by the auto industry meant the production of 75,000 fewer vehicles. Employers received financial subsidies from the federal government, which had supported and stimulated the employer's intransigence regarding reopening negotiations with the strikers. After all, it wanted to impose an exemplary defeat, and in an immediate sense, it did. The workers, after the long strike, returned to the factories without having had their demands met. For many of them, the financial difficulties then intensified with the start of layoffs after their return to work.Footnote 54 Moreover, the most important leaders of the trade union, including Lula, were arrested.
Despite its dismal and costly result for the workers, the strike of 1980 fostered evaluations and processes that many of their peers felt to be positive. Some opted for emphasizing that, when confronting a state seen as an “enemy,” the “forty-one days strike,” which took place in a framework of primary links and mistrust of a political system hardly capable of channeling workers' demands at all, configured itself as a symbol of the politicizing of daily life and the quest for autonomy that characterized the social movements that emerged in the second half of 1970s.Footnote 55 Others, among them many trade union leaders of ABC Paulista, considering that the demands of the workers were not met and that state repression and legal restrictions profoundly limited trade union action, emphasized that the strike of 1980 consolidated the workers' need to take advantage of the spaces which, with the “opening,” were emerging in the political system, and organize political party links to ensure and expand their possibilities within institutional activities. Such assessments gave a new impetus to the process of founding in 1980 the Workers' Party (PT), Brazil's dominant political party since 2002,Footnote 56 and had wide repercussions in the configuration of contemporary Brazil. For now, however, let us return to the pickets, decisive elements for gaining an understanding of the duration and intensity of workers' engagement in the “forty-one days strike.”
Pickets in Action in the Strike of 1980: Patterns of Practice and the Use of Violence
Gathered on the sidewalk are dozens of workers clapping and shouting enthusiastically, “Stop! Come on out!” They seek to communicate with the metalworkers who have not joined the strike called at the general assembly and who were on their way to work in the buses that many companies made available for daily transport. Out in the street, a smaller group is approaching the buses that circulate at low speed, signaling for the drivers to stop the vehicles. A growing group of policemen follows all of this attentively from the other side of the street. A bus stops. The small contingent that intercepted the bus sees their numbers swell as workers who are on the sidewalk boost the chanting of “Come on out!” Some of them are carrying trade union newsletters on the progress of the strike and offer them to those on the buses through the windows. After a brief interval, the vehicle opens its doors. In the midst of applause, smiling workers begin to get off the bus and join the workers on the sidewalks. Some embrace one another. While this is happening, the number of police has almost doubled. Trying to shut down the actions of successful picketers, the police sergeant commanding the operation gives orders to a union leader for immediate dispersal of workers and noninterference with the buses. If these instructions are not followed, there would be arrests. Slowly, the workers, even though they are in a public place acting peacefully, begin to disperse. Scenes such as this can be seen many times in movie footageFootnote 57 about the strikes undertaken in 1979 and 1980 by the ABC Paulista metalworkers. They provide important documentation and, taken together, they have made these strikes the workers' mobilizations most addressed by Brazilian filmmakers.Footnote 58 For the purposes of this article, they have also expanded the supporting information available for more detailed investigation of the picket phenomenon.
In the “forty-one days strike,” the pickets were formed as a result of the mobilization of a varied spectrum of social bonds and acted in various spaces using multiple methods of inducement and coercion. Argumentative persuasion, moral pressure, and physical/symbolic violence were resources used by all the modalities of picket lines described below. These coexisted at various moments in the strike, with the relative importance of each fluctuating with regard to the form and intensity of the repression adopted by the State to confront the working-class mobilization underway.
The “factory gates pickets” were, by and large, prepared by the union and basically counted on the participation of trade union activists, many of them militants belonging to left-wing political organizations who already worked clandestinely in the manufacturing spaces and who were capable of mobilizing hundreds of potential participants.Footnote 59 Their highly public visibility made this type of picket the one most targeted by the police. Quite often, that same quality attracted important public figures, particularly legislators, who joined with the workers and endeavored to mediate conflicts and whose presence was a factor tending to limit police violence. In the first days of the strike of 1980, this modality of picket was not very active. The union itself discouraged it because, a few months before, an important trade union leader in the city of São Paulo had been killed by the police in a picket of this type. However, as the stoppage went on, the importance of the “factory gates pickets” grew because there were some workers who were trying to go back to work.Footnote 60
With the hearing on the illegality of the strike by the Regional Labor Court on April 14, and the declaration of federal intervention in the union, this type of picket suffered serious restrictions due to the increased police contingent that “encamped” in São Bernardo do Campo,Footnote 61 especially in the central areas and at the factory gates. At the same time, the “neighborhood pickets” that had already sprung up, primarily at bus stops, grew in significance.Footnote 62 They were, in general, smaller groupings than the “factory gates pickets” and while their makeup also relied largely on trade union activists, the latter used their social networks in the neighborhoods where they lived to enlist work colleagues, neighbors, friends, relatives, and so forth, into the pickets.Footnote 63
From April 19 on, with the first arrests of trade union activists and directors, the ban on general assemblies in public spaces, and the state of siege of the Paulista ABC conducted by the State forces of repression, the neighborhoods increasingly became the fundamental spaces for collective mobilizations.Footnote 64 In such circumstances, informal versions of “coercion groups” expanded their importance in working-class mobilizations with extremely variable numbers of participants, among them activists, whether or not they were trade unionists. As they came to coerce strike-breakers in their own homes, we might call these groups “front door pickets.”
A careful analysis of police documentation concerning the arrests of workers accused of acting as picketsFootnote 65 reveals to us that creating pickets animated a broad range of existing loyalties based on kinship, friendship, neighborhood, and region of origin. Relational ties, at first sight unseen, fostered a remarkable cohesion demonstrated by picketers in risky actions. Strong evidence of the importance that certain social networks could have for engaging pickets in clashes with the police are the arrests of workers who, possessing some kind of bond with a given striker, involved themselves in such risky actions even though they were not metalworkers.Footnote 66
This suggests to us the existence of a dense relational fabric in the neighborhoods in which the workers lived. It appears that bonds of kinship, friendship, residence, and region of origin had a more striking presence in “neighborhood” and “front door” pickets, but that does not mean that such links were absent from “factory gates” pickets.Footnote 67 It is clear that many workers, regardless of such ties with other picketers, joined in pickets either because of trade union activism, or because they belonged to supporting organizations of other types, or simply because they understood that the demands of the strike were fair and wanted to carry them forward. In that sense, the union board, the wages committees, the meetings in churches, the associations of friends of the neighborhood, as well as the public assemblies, were spheres of articulation that brought into contact and coordinated many different workers who undertook picketing in various modalities. Even a picket destined to act as a “front door” picket could be involved in all or any of those various spheres.Footnote 68
In terms of the makeup of “factory” or “neighborhood” pickets, the roles of union boards and the wages committees were even more decisive.Footnote 69 To be precise, those pickets reflected bonds from preexisting informal backgrounds, and the loyalties inherent to them, and interacted with the demands and guidelines of the union boards, the salaries committees, and the meetings open to the general public. Thus, however much they may have been anchored in those bonds and loyalties, the pickets' actions also acquired a contextual meaning based on the current political situation and the moral values prevailing among the workers.
In fact, political rationality and morality were, in general, simultaneously present in the orientation of the pickets' actions throughout the metalworkers' struggle. However, it is possible to identify two distinct moments: In the first, political rationality was preponderant, and in the second, morality. Those, in turn, were associated with important changes in the “meaning of the violence”Footnote 70 employed by the pickets.
Between April 1 and April 30, when pickets were predominantly driven by rational politics, in general, they made moderate use of violence, including physical violence, with the fundamental objective of uniting the workers around the strikers' movement, gaining members, or staying on strike. Guided by a sense of political intervention in critical moments of confrontation with employers and the State, the pickets aspired, basically, to counterbalance the constraints imposed by both antagonists, trying to establish a counterweight to the pressures on the metalworkers' in their decisions on the strike. Thus, considering that the strike of 1980 was still an “open” event and strike-breakers could convert to strikers (and vice versa), pickets rarely made use of exaggerated violence. During that period, argumentative persuasion and moral pressure enjoyed ample space in the actions of pickets, who sought, fundamentally, to intimidate strikebreakers and vacillating strikers and made use of verbal threats and multiple forms of symbolic violence. This moderate use of violence also helped prevent episodes that could have had negative repercussions in the “public eye” that observed the metalworkers' strike.
However, after April 30 and, in particular, between May 4 and May 10, the last week of the strike, when morality prevailed in the orientation of pickets, there were blatantly punitive connotations to their actions and, more frequently, the immoderate use of physical violence, in particular, as indicated by the increase in the numbers of strike-breaker beatings and the random stoning of the buses that took them to their workplaces.Footnote 71 The multiple forms of violence, which had been primarily employed for the purpose of unity, went on, then, to serve, predominantly, as confirming practices of exclusion of strike-breakers from the “moral community” of the strikers.
By then, the “forty-one day strike” had lost its character as an “open” event to become a “closed” event, since the metalworkers' strike virtually no longer existed. In fact, from April 30 on, many of the workers, pressured by employers' threats, by intense police repression, by the lack of political prospects for the movement, and by the many economic difficulties experienced by the strikers due to the long period of inactivity, sought to return to work. Even though the strike of 1980 was virtually over as a political event, picketers continued acting. If, in terms of political rationality, the pickets were increasingly devoid of meaning, from the point of view of morality, the strike-breaker, often times called “shameless” and “traitor,” deserved to be punished.
That was what was behind the continuing actions of the pickets that, in a way, expressed the basic configuration of the “forty-one days strike,” which was simultaneously, “a community of interests” and “a community of values.”
Conclusions
The comparative study of the composition and activities of pickets in the strikes of 1957 and 1980 suggests to us that, perhaps, pickets should be investigated as a prominent part of a repertory of collective action of the Greater São Paulo workersFootnote 72 in the second half of the twentieth century, providing us with important elements of continuity in the process of class formation in progress.
In this period of remarkable expansion of the industrial base of the country and concentration of workers in large factories and in metropolitan areas, especially in the center-south, connections between factories and neighborhoods were present in several other collective actions of the proletariat of the metropolitan area that we now call “Greater” São Paulo. The “strike of 400,000” (1953), for example, involved several sectors of São Paulo workers and had already revealed “the existence of a culture created in factories and neighborhoods capable of supporting the great struggles necessary for the defense of workers.”Footnote 73 Similarly, when, from the late 1970s on, hundreds of thousands of workers fostered a wave of strikes that swept across the metropolitan region of São Paulo, it was possible, with a certain regularity, to note an “adaptation of networks of interpersonal social organizations, such as neighborhood associations, sports clubs, or religious groups, to assist the mobilization of workers.”Footnote 74
The analysis of pickets in the strikes of 1957 and 1980 reiterates such comments on the articulation of multiple experiences and social spaces. If experiences in places of work and the perception of factory exploitation urged on the main demands of the workers, encouraging them to strike, bonds woven in places of residence, and in other spaces of sociability offered a clear substrata for collective mobilization.Footnote 75 That should draw our attention to the varied and recurring modes by which, in this period, Brazilian workers acted within processes of industrialization, migration, and urbanization, often articulating them through their social networks.
In addition, contradicting contemporary images that insist on perpetuating the idea of pickets as a form of collective disorganized aggressive action, virtually to the point of irrationality,Footnote 76 the evidence of the pickets in the strikes of 1957 and 1980 indicates that they reflected highly structured and complex social configurations, guided both by interests and values and by political rationality and morality, and made use of various forms of violence shaped by understandable rules and contexts. The uses and meanings with which various forms of violence have been exploited in pickets seem to us, therefore, a further element of continuity of a repertoire of collective action shared by workers of Greater São Paulo in the second half of the twentieth century.
Finally, the pickets were, during the period examined here, one of the main ways in which the workers of Greater São Paulo, by acquiring visibility for themselves and for others, publicly expressed the fact that visibility had been restricted or totally denied to them in various political conjunctures. Having to act politically in the face of a state apparatus that, even in democratic times, kept the working class and its organizations under police surveillance, the workers of Greater São Paulo repeatedly saw pickets as a way to control or conquer the public space with some security, or protection from reprisals from the police and the bosses. Effective instruments of communication and organization, the pickets promoted the cohesion of the workers, opening up spaces for their engagement in massive collective mobilizations. In addition, because of their public nature, the pickets offered the multitudes the support and even the presence of other social sectors that made them feel that they were protected in joining the demands of the workers.
