NEGOTIATE LIFE? collective bargaining during the pandemic in Brazil

This paper analyzes how the union movement faced the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, investigating the collective bargaining that took place between March 2020 and early 2021. Its core question inquires: have unions been able to build webs of protection for their members, in the form of collective norms agreed upon with employers? A pertinent question, since the 2017 labor reform immensely weakened the capacity of organized labor to act, by ending the union tax and limiting collective bargaining to consensual forms of funding, thereby impoverishing unions; and by reducing the scope of issues subject to collective bargaining, which was aggravated by the federal provisional measures aimed at facilitating the business response to the crisis, at the expense of workers’ income. The empirical research is based on collective bargaining results from four categories of essential workers: food and supermarket retailers, nurses, truck drivers, and bank clerks.

Collective bargaining; Pandemic; Labor reform; Essential workers; Union movement