Editorial

Bolsonaro meets Biden while Amazon Defenders Disappear in Brazil

The disappearance of British journalist Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, an expert on the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and a longtime advocate on their behalf, has drawn intense domestic and international attention. At the recent Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, protestors linked the case to the reckless environmental policies and authoritarian inclinations of President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies. Missing since June 5, Phillips and Pereira were last seen venturing alone upriver in a deep part of the Amazon jungle. Phillips, a longtime freelance reporter who has written frequently for The Guardian and Washington Post, was working on a book project while Pereira went along as a friend, guide, and travel companion. Pereira in particular had attracted numerous death threats prior to his disappearance for his staunch opposition to the illegal depredation of the rainforest that has reached the worst level in decades under Bolsonaro. He had reportedly been fired from Funai, the government agency tasked with overseeing relations between the federal government and indigenous peoples, while former judge Sergio Moro was Minister of Justice. He was allegedly in the process of denouncing ongoing criminal operations in the rainforest. At this point, hopes of finding the two alive are fading, underscoring the danger for journalists and serious government bureaucrats under the current administration.

With this recent tragedy in the background, the first meeting between Bolsonaro and US President Joe Biden was, by all accounts, cordial but superficial. The leaders of the two largest democracies in the Americas talked about shared values, interests, and history while largely avoiding the most contentious topics between them, including Bolsonaro’s close alliance with former president Donald Trump and his questioning of the polls in both the United States and Brazil. The meeting had been on thin diplomatic ice when several leaders threatened not to attend to protest the Biden administration’s refusal to invite representatives from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Mexico, for example, sent representatives but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself did not attend. Perhaps the most important scoop to come out of the summit was that Bolsonaro asked Biden for help in blocking former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to the presidency. Lula has maintained a comfortable lead in every poll released this year. Bolsonaro, according to the explosive Bloomberg article that cited unnamed sources close to the talks between both heads of state, sought to present Lula as inimical to US interests. Biden reportedly simply changed the subject.

Lula, however, is intent on signaling moderation. The biggest gesture in that direction, of course, is his selection of conservative former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate. But Lula is also revising some of his earlier, more aggressive language regarding the policy legacies of former president Michel Temer and Bolsonaro. For example, Lula now speaks of “revising” the labor law passed in 2017 under Temer rather than revoking it entirely. Among other things, the law weakened labor unions by doing away with the imposto sindical, an annual deduction from workers’ paychecks to pay for union activities . Similarly, there have been various indications that Eletrobrás, a major Brazil electric utility company, recently privatized by the Bolsonaro government, will not be renationalized after all under a new Lula administration. Doing so, as columnist Celso Rocha de Barros argued in Folha de São Paulo, would likely use up all the available funds a new Lula administration would hope to dedicate to other spending priorities. Lula’s attempts to create a broad front against Bolsonaro and demonstrate his moderation has translated into a durable lead in the polls. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s inability to renew economic growth and instill confidence in his ability to govern competently has so far frozen him in second place in the campaign. 

Highlights

• SIMONE TEBET: A manifesto released last week by a group of 300 business leaders and economists anointed Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) pre-presidential candidate Simone Tebet as "the best way for Brazil." However, she appears stuck at 2% in recent election polls. Nor does the percentage that indicates the possibility of future growth in support for her candidacy. The senator's "potential vote" rate was 13% three months ago and still remains at that figure.

• UN AND ELECTIONS: The United Nations has demanded that this year’s electoral process in Brazil remain independent from any institutional interference and has warned of the danger of violence against women, blacks and representatives of the LGBTI+ movement running for office in October. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet presented the alert before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in a report on situations that concern the entity.

• LAVA JATO AND ODEBRECHT: Alexandrino Alencar, a former executive of the Odebrecht construction company, has stated that Lava-Jato (Car Wash) prosecutors pressured him to involve former President Lula of the Workers’ Party in his plea bargain agreement. The allegation appears in the documentary Amigo Secreto (Secret Friend) by director Maria Augusta Ramos, which premiered this week. Alencar says that investigators were constantly inquiring about Lula and only accepted the deal after the former president was named. His testimony was considered fundamental to Lula's convictions, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

• MILITARY AND ELECTIONS: The New York Times published an article stating that President Jair Bolsonaro has an ally in the Armed Forces for his questions about the fairness of the Brazilian electoral process. According to the publication, leaders of the Brazilian Armed Forces “suddenly” began to raise doubts similar to those raised by the Brazilian president regarding the integrity of the elections, ignoring the fact that there had never been any proven fraud in previous elections. For the newspaper, the statements made by the president, by a large part of right-wing voters, and by some military leaders that the election is open to fraud have created a climate of tension in Brazil. “With just over four months to go before one of the most important votes in Latin America in years, a high-stakes showdown is brewing,” the text reads.

Feature Article

Loss of Workers’ Rights and Precarious Nature of the Labor Market

By Paula Marcelino

Brazil has a historically restricted and exclusionary labor market. Many people work without any type of contract. At only one moment over the last century, during Dilma Rousseff's first term as president (2011-14), has more than 50% of the working population been employed with a formal contract. Today, in 11 of the 27 Brazilian states, there are more informal than formal workers, that is, people who do not have a labor contract or receive the minimum wage. The result is that a large percentage of the population that works remains below the poverty line, surviving on less than US$1.90 a day. In most Brazilian cities (2,892 out of 5,570) there are more people receiving federal government assistance for families that are demonstrably in poverty (Auxílio Brasil, a successor to Bolsa Família, which grants approximately US$85.00 a month), than people with formal employment contracts.

In Brazil, a country with a dependent economy, with late and deficient industrialization and a history of high unemployment rates, the process of formalizing the employment contract has always been a means of poverty reduction. This formalization was regulated at the federal level, roughly speaking, with a set of laws formulated in the 1940s and expanded with the 1988 Constitution. A formal contract guarantees, for example, that a worker receives an indemnity allowance if dismissed without just cause, paid vacations, paid health and maternity leave, and regulation of working hours, among other benefits and protections. Working under a contract with labor law protection had been increasing in Brazil, but has regressed since the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Over the last six years, many measures have been implemented and laws have been changed that made the job market in Brazil even more precarious and exclusionary. I will address the four most important measures.

1) As soon as Michel Temer took office in 2016 after the impeachment of President Rousseff, he adopted a policy of radical austerity, instituting, through a constitutional amendment (EC 95/2016), a spending ceiling that limits for twenty years the growth of federal government expenditures. Never in the country's history, not even during the twenty-one years of military dictatorship, has there been such a radical austerity measure. The spending ceiling imposes a sharp cut in federal expenditures in health, education, and infrastructure, signaling the abandonment of the neo-developmentalist policy of the Workers' Party governments. This new policy under Temer was associated with the consequences of the Lava Jato Operation, which was a judicial operation theoretically directed against corruption. It was quite irregular and, in many ways, corrupted, leading to the near paralysis of civil construction, a sector of the economy that hired the greatest number of workers. Since then, overall, unemployment rates have gone up.

2) Also under the Temer government Congress approved Law No. 13,429/2017, which allows unlimited, unrestricted outsourcing in all activities of private companies or the public sector. What's more, the law also allows for so-called cascade outsourcing, that is, a company already outsourced, subcontracts other companies, in an infinite chain. Studies show that over the last years outsourcing in Brazil has been the biggest factor in the reduction of wages, the precariousness of working conditions, and the externalization of conflicts of a union nature. There are simply no known cases that refute these first two factors.

3) Temer's interim government rushed to implement reforms to make the workforce cheaper. Thus, in November 2017, a labor reform was approved. It relaxed more than 100 articles of labor protection legislation and union regulation, as well as reduced the chances of access to and the power of the Labor Court system, traditionally the branch of the judiciary most favorable to workers. This affected working hours, the regulation of overtime, conditions for dismissal, and types of contracts. Virtually nothing escaped the flexibilization that overwhelmingly favored employers to the detriment of pay and working conditions. Five years later, there is no data that proves that the promise of the labor reform, namely, the creation of jobs, has been fulfilled.

4) In November 2019, under the Bolsonaro government, a pension reform came into force (Constitutional Amendment 103/2019). It established a minimum retirement age (65 for men and 62 for women), which especially affects workers who enter the labor market earlier, who will be obliged to contribute for a longer period of time until they reach the minimum age. In addition, due to the increase in informal labor relations and the precarious nature of work contracts, expanded by the labor reform, most workers do not contribute to the social security system, so they cannot accumulate the necessary contribution time to be able to retire with a pension.

While the Bolsonaro government has offered no indication that it plans to modify the current precarious nature of employment in Brazil for a large segment of the population, presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is currently ahead in the polls, has promised to revisit and revise if not overturn many of the provisions in the new labor legislation that are considered by most experts to be harmful to the interests of Brazilian workers.

Paula Marcelino is a professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. She has published books and articles on outsourcing, precariousness of work and unionism in Brazil. For the English-speaking reader, the following readings are indicated: The Brazilian Union Movement in the Twenty-first Century: The PT Governments, the Coup, and the Counterreforms. Latin American Perspectives, v. 47, 2020.

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