Editorial

Presidential Pardons and Military Dog Whistles

Last week, President Jair Bolsonaro pardoned Congressman Daniel Silveira after the Supreme Court sentenced him to over eight years and nine months in prison. Silveira, a far-right early supporter of Bolsonaro, had been accused of threatening justices on the highest court. His sentencing was taken as a sign that the Supreme Court would act decisively against the president’s allies who attacked different branches of government. Bolsonaro’s pardon, the legality of which has been called into question, effectively undoes the Court’s will, setting up a likely confrontation in the future about the limits of presidential power.

It took former President Lula a few days to respond to this development. Critics said this was because Lula himself intends to play fast and loose with pardons if he returns to power next year. During a press conference for independent journalists on Monday, however, Lula addressed Bolsonaro’s latest move against the separation of powers. The former president called Bolsonaro’s move “stupid” and explained his decision to avoid saying anything about the move in the immediate aftermath: "This is a debate that I didn't even comment on, because everything [Bolsonaro] wanted happened. . . He did it on Thursday, and it was in the news on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. All he wants is to stay in the news, which is what happened.” In other words, according to Lula, Bolsonaro’s pardon of Silveira was deliberately intended to control the political discourse. The president wants to rile up his supporters while dictating the terms of political debate. By refusing to engage right away, Lula asserted that he was sidestepping a trap Bolsonaro was trying to set for him. Lula insisted he would remain focus on more mundane yet pressing topics like inflation, unemployment, and development, issues that Bolsonaro is not eager to discuss given how badly they have been handled during his administration.

Bolsonaro’s renewed hostility to the judiciary is most dangerous, of course, if backed up by the armed forces. Many observers, including some on the left believe it remains unlikely that the military would support Bolsonaro if he were to challenge the outcome of the election. This does not mean, however, that military men have been models of civic behavior. For example, the armed forces officially asked the Superior Electoral Court, tasked with overseeing the legal elements of the voting process in Brazil, to put in place new measures to follow and certify electoral results. The idea that electoral results cannot be trusted has been a consistent Bolsonaro refrain (despite the fact that he won in 2018). That the armed forces are parroting this line in the form of vague concerns about the reliability of electoral results indicates a kind of tacit support for the president’s argument. There is no evidence that widespread electoral fraud exists in Brazil. By seconding Bolsonaro’s request for new electoral measures ahead of the 2022 vote, the armed forces are using technical, dispassionate language to effectively weigh in on the side of the president. This is one of many examples of how Bolsonaro has repoliticized the military in ways unprecedented since the return of democracy over thirty years ago. This will be a lasting legacy.

Highlights

• LULA WINS AT THE UN: The UN Human Rights Committee concluded that Operation Car Wash was biased against former President Lula da Silva. The UN also concluded that his political rights were violated in 2018 when he was prohibited from running in the elections.

• JUSTICE X MORO: A Brazilian court decision ruled that ex-president Lula’s lawyers be compensated for the misconduct of former judge Sergio Moro. The ruling considered his conduct to be unlawful for having intercepted phone calls and invading the privacy of the lawyers by making their communications public.

• INVESTIGATION OF THE PRESIDENT'S SON: Messages analyzed by the Federal Police reveal that businessmen sought out Jair Renan Bolsonaro, the president's son who has no government position, to request audiences with the president and other authorities. Jair Renan denies that he was involved in influence peddling and says that his name is being invoked inaccurately.

• THREAT TO ELECTIONS: President Jair Bolsonaro brought up the possibility of suspending the elections. "They don't think it would be just for the president," he said. “It would be for the Senate, for the House, if there is anything abnormal.” Steering away from his old preference for the criticizing the electronic voting machines, the president now wants the military to do a parallel tally of votes. These statements were made during a public ceremony broadcast on state TV.

• ELECTORAL PROCESS INTEGRITY: The Election Transparency Commission (CTE), a created by the Superior Electoral Court (STE), released ten measures to increase the reliability and transparency of the electoral process. Recently, a Supreme Court minister said that the Armed Forces “are being directed” to attack the electoral process. In response, the Ministry of Defense issued a statement calling the minister’s comment a “delusion” and a “grave offense.”

• GENERAL PRESIDENT: The Podemos Party is considering launching General Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz as a pre-candidate for the presidency. Santos Cruz was a minister in the Government Secretariat and was later fired by President Jair Bolsonaro.

• LULA: LEFT, CENTER, OR RIGHT? Former President Lula declared what the ideological position of a possible new government would be in 2023 if he wins the election. "I don't have to necessarily be a president more to the left, right, or center; I have to be president," he said. “I have to know the reality and what needs to be done”.

• BRAZIL UNION TO LEAVE THE "THIRD WAY.”: Luciano Bivar, the national president and pre-candidate of Brazil Union, indicated that his party may not participate further in negotiations with the MDB, PSDB, and the Citizenship party around a single presidential candidate and may defend running on his own, with the former Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro as the vice-presidential candidate.

• CONSPIRACY: Running on his own, without an electoral alliance, Ciro Gomes (Democratic Labor Party, PDT) said he has no problem talking to the so-called Third Way if the meeting has “criteria, rules, and objectives” and does not become “a conspiracy.”

Feature Article

Labor Rights in Bolsonaro’s Brazil – A Tragedy Foretold

by Jana Silverman

As workers around the world, including Brazilian labor activists, plan their activities to commemorate May Day next week, Brazilian workers are acutely aware that they have little to celebrate right now. In 2021, 13.2% of workers were unemployed, significantly higher than already-astronomical pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, 24.3% of Brazilian workers who are lucky enough to have a job are considered underemployed, meaning that they do not receive enough hours, or that their skills and education are being underutilized at their current occupations.  In addition, a record percentage of 48.7% of all Brazilian workers labor in the informal sector, which means that they do not have legal work contracts and their employers do not pay their social security contributions, leaving them without the possibility of a public pension in their old age or social protections in case of disability.  Contributing to this perfect storm for the Brazilian labor movement is the soaring, persistent inflation that corroded working families’ real incomes by over 10% in 2021, and the incapacity of a weakened union movement to effectively negotiate cost-of-living increases for formal-sector workers.  Brazilian labor leaders are betting on an electoral victory by the Workers’ Party (PT) pre-candidate President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva to brighten this somber panorama for workers and their families, but it will not be an easy task even for Lula, especially if he comes to power without sufficient support in the fragmented Congress. 

This tragedy for Brazilian workers did not start with Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, but traces back to the economic and political crisis which began in the earlier part of the previous decade.  As external factors such as the fall in export commodity prices began to create economic pressure on the government of President Dilma Rousseff in 2014-2015, Brazilian elites began to effectively press for a thoroughgoing reform of Brazilian labor law, considered too “antiquated” and too “protective” of workers.  This reform (or “deform” as it was dubbed by unionists) was finally enacted under the interim Temer administration in November 2017, drastically altering over 100 articles in the 1943 labor code, in detriment to worker and union rights. 

Some of the most significant provisions in the reform increased employers’ ability to outsource work, introduced new forms of precarious labor contracts, allowed for concessionary bilateral labor-management agreements that lower labor standards below than what is guaranteed by law, created obstacles for low-income workers to access judicial remedies for labor law violations, and perhaps most importantly for the labor movement, eliminated the mandatory union tax, which most union organizations depended on for their financial sustenance. Due in large part to the provisions in this reform, unions have lost 97.5% of their income from these formerly mandatory contributions and over 2.9 million workers have disaffiliated from their respective unions since the law was enacted in 2017.

The Brazilian labor movement’s dramatic loss of political, financial, and associative power in recent years has weakened its capacity to negotiate better collective bargaining contracts for its members, to organize new members, especially among the burgeoning ranks of informal food delivery and rideshare platform workers, and to contribute to the larger struggle against the attacks on workers’ livelihoods and democratic institutions by the Bolsonaro administration. As mentioned earlier, 52% of collective bargaining agreements negotiated in March 2022 did not guarantee any real wage increase for workers covered by these instruments, and unions were also unable to advocate for real growth in the national monthly minimum wage, which the Bolsonaro administration unilaterally increased by only R$ 112 (US$ 24) in January 2022.

Despite their limitations, unions have refused to passively acquiesce to the varied attacks that have been thrown at them since Bolsonaro’s rise to power. The labor movement, in conjunction with its political allies in the PT and other left and center-left parties, were able to successfully pressure the Brazilian Congress to expand the emergency pandemic aid that was given to poor and working-class families from R$ 200/month initially proposed by the Executive branch to R$ 600/month. This meant that 27.3 million Brazilians escaped falling into extreme poverty during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Likewise, the union movement fought successfully against converting into permanent legislation a 2020 presidential decree which created a new form of precarious contract, the “Carteira Verde Amarela,” which offered fewer social security and unemployment benefits for young workers covered under this form of employment.

As the electoral season heats up, Brazilian unions are determined to work together to better engage their members to vote for pro-labor candidates. On April 7 in São Paulo, nine national union federations came together to launch a common set of political demands to be presented to the candidates standing in the October Presidential elections, which include proposals to promote job creation, strengthen social protection measures, end anti-union practices, and defend democratic institutions. Many of these same labor federations are now organizing unified May Day celebrations across the country, to protest the privations that workers are currently suffering, and to galvanize working-class support for the Lula pre-candidacy and for pro-labor Congressional candidates. Labor leaders are hoping that popular indignation against Bolsonaro’s blatant disregard for human life during the COVID-19 pandemic, expressed in the massive “Fora Bolsonaro” protests that took over Brazil in 2021, will help power a strong vote for anti-authoritarian and anti-neoliberal candidates. As Sergio Nobre, president of the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil’s largest labor federation, has stated, “with Bolsonaro in power, the working class has no future”.

Jana Silverman holds a Ph.D. in Labor Economics from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University. She is also a researcher with the Centro de Estudos Sindicais e Economia do Trabalho (CESIT), UNICAMP and a WBO Research Fellow.  Previously, she was Country Programs Director for Brazil of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in São Paulo from 2012-2020.  Email: jqs7099@psu.edu, ID Lattes: 4357885330837822

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.