Rural Labour Unionism in Brazil: The Transformations of the National Confederation of Farm Workers (CONTAG)

Abstract

This chapter aims to examine the transformation in rural unions as part of a broader analysis of the question of labour in Brazil today. Although some of the literature acknowledges that traditional forms of social organisation have dwindled in Brazil, trade unions—especially those representing rural workers—remain strong. This can be seen not only in the numbers but also in the influence that these unions have, both with state institutions and in international forums (Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers’ Trade Union Movement, 1964–1985. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994; Pereira, End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labour Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997; Carvalho, A produção do transnacional: compilações da agricultura familiar e camponesa na Contag e no MPA. PPG Doctoral Thesis in the Social Sciences. Belo Horizonte, UFMG, 2018).

The union rural workers system in Brazil is comprised of a network of over 4000 affiliate unions that have been grouped under a single umbrella organisation, the National Confederation of Farm Workers (CONTAG), for the past five decades. This mammoth-like but at the same time, tightly concentrated union system has been sustained by two Brazilian legal principles. The first establishes that there can be only one union for each trade in a given geographical area (a concept known as unicidade sindical) while the second establishes “rural worker” as a general occupational category that comprises a wide range of workers and labour relations in the countryside.

The objective of this chapter is to analyse the processes associated with the construction, reinterpretations and subsequent transformations in the rural worker category in the context of union organisation in Brazil. More specifically, it sets out to examine how these transformations influenced CONTAG’s recent division between the occupational categories of the rural worker and the family farmer. The modifications to the rural worker category, in turn, led to changes in the modus operandi, union structure and political organisation of CONTAG. As a result of these adaptations, the system for the representation of rural workers from the countryside is holding steady five decades after it was originally introduced.

The aspects of this process to be explored herein include: (1) the emergence during the 1980s of new political subjects in the countryside who joined diverse social movements and demanded recognition and representation, thus revealing the limitations of the generic category of the “rural worker” and calling into question the CONTAG system’s ability to represent the collective interests of workers; (2) social transformations, a series of changes in production and economics that altered rural labour relations in Brazil, especially among wage earners; (3) a combination of these factors, which contributed to new court interpretations of the rural worker occupational category, leading, in turn, to adaptations at the organisational level among rural trade unions.