Abstract
This chapter intends to stress the significant political experience of shop-floor workers’ organization at Volkswagen in the Brazilian main industrial district, ABC paulista. The articulation of workers within companies has guaranteed the legitimacy of trade union resistance to the authoritarianism of management and the political regime in the period of military governments in the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, under pressure from flexibilization and the precariousness of labor relations, unions and factory committees, like in VW’s case, have been demonstrating the possibility of using this power to defend employment and a decent work agenda, and, at the same time, it can be an example of interaction in international networks for the establishment of certain standards of labor regulation that can be applied to a transnational context.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Francisco (2007), the VW National Committee was created in July 2005, during the 1st National Meeting of Representatives of the Factory Committees and Volkswagen Workers Union, held in Ubatuba, SP. It organizes 27,400 workers in five plants, and one of its objectives is to unite, with the same collective convention, in the name of the rights and benefits of the Volkswagen workers in Brazil.
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Ramalho, J.R. (2019). Workers’ Participation at the Shop Floor Level and Trade Unions in Brazil: Economic Crisis and New Strategies of Political Action. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_14
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