Abstract
The main objective of the article is to revise the ethnographies of labor, as well as the extended case studies that during the 1970s and 1980s saw the transformation of the São Bernardo metalworking group into one of the most important political actors in the redemocratization process of the country, precipitating the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship and inaugurating what some authors called the “era of democratic inventions”. For such, it focuses initially on the social roots of the workers’ unrest process on the relationship between the upsurge of industrial despotism and the limits to negotiation imposed by authoritarian regulation as a catalyst for the strike cycle that lasted from 1978 to 1981. Finally, this article seeks to identify, within the historical context of the strike wave of the late 1970s, the formation of the hegemonic social relation that combined the passive consent of social bases with the active consent of the union leaders in the creation of Lula’s regulation of social conflicts style that prevailed in the country between the years 2003 and 2016.
Keywords:
Syndicalism; São Bernardo; Lula; Strikes; Peons