BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND MARTÍN KOPPEL
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Oil workers in Brazil suspended
their 31-day-old national strike June 2 and returned to work
after the government agreed to negotiate a disputed wage
agreement and review the firings of dozens of strikers. The
regime also withdrew the army troops that had occupied four
of the struck refineries, which belong to the state-owned
company Petrobra's.
Two of the unresolved issues are the fines and firings the Brazilian government slapped on the United Federation of Oil Workers (FUP) during the course of the strike. The administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso insists the union must pay $35.7 million in fines imposed by the Supreme Labor Tribunal. The union is fighting to reinstate 59 fired workers; the government has agreed to review this issue but claims the number of dismissed unionists is 104.
"After staying out for 31 days, we had reached a standoff with the government," said Silvio José Marques, president of Sindipetro, the union of oil workers at the Paulínia refinery near Sao Paulo. "We decided to go back united, just as we all went out on strike united." He spoke to the Militant in a June 6 phone interview.
"Although we couldn't continue the work stoppage, the government was politically weakened by our fight. People have returned to work with very high morale."
Negotiations between the oil union and Petrobra's resumed
June 6.
"If there is an impasse or flouting of any decision [on
the part of the authorities], we would be ready to go back
on strike," FUP president Antonio Spis told the daily Jornal
do Brasil.
Many workers are angry at the regime, which did its utmost to try to crush the strike. At the beginning of the fight, "I still had hope," said Adriano Batista, 31, who works at the Rio de Janeiro refinery. But since the day the Supreme Labor Tribunal ruled the work stoppage illegal, "I no longer expect anything from this government," he stated.
The strike began May 3, when 47,000 workers shut down 11 refineries around the country. They demanded the Cardoso administration abide by a contract the government signed last September granting a wage increase. The struggle also took on a broader character in opposition to the regime's plans to sell off major shares of Petrobra's to foreign and Brazilian capitalists, lay off thousands of workers, and accelerate production.
After the suspension of the strike, government officials stated they would press ahead with this economic plan.
The oil workers' strike became the first major political crisis of the Cardoso administration. "It was the longest strike in our union's history," said Antonio Carrara, a worker at the Paulínia refinery, in a phone interview from the union headquarters in Campinas, near Sao Paulo. This action followed and overlapped with a series of work stoppages by other industrial workers totaling as many as 300,000 strikers.
Despite enormous pressures, few workers crossed the picket lines. Brazil's capitalists deployed all their class weapons to attack the strikers, from the courts to the media, which tried to turn public opinion against the unionists by blaming them for gas shortages. When this intimidation failed, the government sent in the army to occupy four plants, including three in the state of Sao Paulo.
The union ranks countered every move by the government. For example, at the strike headquarters in Campinas, unionists showed visiting Militant reporters petitions they had drawn up to protest the company's selective firing of strikers. The "Petition for Collective Dismissal" demanded the authorities either fire all 47,000 oil workers or none. At the Paulínia plant, half the workforce of 1,000 signed the protest letter.
Activity at army-occupied plant
The strength of the strike was evident June 1 from the
main entrance to the Paulínia refinery, which was occupied
by the army. Dozens of soldiers and several tanks and
armored vehicles could be seen inside the plant. But only
two buses and a few cars with workers left and entered the
refinery at shift change.
"They mainly have engineers and technicians operating the refinery, together with a few strikebreakers," explained striker Severino Cosmos Bezerra, who was staffing an information tent outside the plant gate along with a few other unionists. "Only one distillation unit of the four production units is operating. It produces a little, which is probably below quality and therefore unsellable."
At about 1:00 a.m. that day, Bezerra reported, an explosion in the plant caused a fire, revealing the poor conditions of the scab-run operation. Carrara and several other strikers stayed up all night to help put out the fire. "The company might have tried to blame the union for sabotage," Carrara explained.
Strikers in Campinas reached out for and won broader backing among working people in this heavily industrialized area. "We've received solidarity from metalworkers, bus drivers, city workers, shoe workers, hotel employees, electrical workers, and many others," said Bezerra.
Chemical workers and postal workers, for example, distributed a leaflet that explained the stakes involved in the strike and reproduced copies of oil workers' modest paychecks to answer the lie that the strikers were a greedy and highly paid labor aristocracy.
The leaflet explained that in opposing the selloff of the oil company, the strikers were also "defending the people's patrimony." It drew attention to "the example of what has happened in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile," whose governments have opened up their countries' economies to greater imperialist investment, laying off thousands and slashing wages in the process.
Another show of solidarity came from a community of 80 peasants at nearby Sumaré, who brought the oil strikers truckloads of vegetables and fruit. "These farmers used to be landless," union president Marques explained. "Ten years ago they occupied a plot of land and fought for it. Our union supported them. Through the Movement of Landless Rural Workers, they won the right to the land, and now they are supporting us."
Regime escalates attacks
As the duration of the strike approached one month, the
Cardoso regime escalated its attack. It threatened to carry
out mass firings, while Petrobra's placed ads in newspapers
announcing it would start hiring replacement workers.
Attorney General Moacir Machado da Silva said union officials could be charged with criminal offenses and sentenced to up to three years in prison under laws barring the interruption of utilities "serving the collective interest" as well as the occupation of industrial facilities. This last threat was directed at the workers who had occupied the Cubatao refinery, near the coastal city of Santos in the state of Sao Paulo.
At the same time, each day the strikers held out, the Brazilian ruling class faced increasing problems. Some big- business commentators noted that while the initial government claims of gas shortages had been exaggerated to whip up public opinion against the oil workers, now the lack of fuel was becoming a real threat to public transportation and industry. Editorials began to complain that the government was increasingly being viewed as responsible for prolonging the conflict and causing hardship to the population.
After the regime threatened mass dismissals, 1,500 strikers at the refinery in Bahia responded by occupying the plant June 1.
On May 31, the government for the first time indicated it might "review" the firings of dozens of strikers as part of negotiations with the union once the workers returned to their jobs. The next day, a group of congresspeople from several parties asked the government to resume negotiations.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of the Workers Party (PT), which is tied to Brazil's union movement, sent a letter to Cardoso June 1 accusing him of "intransigence" and holding him responsible for prolonging the conflict.
On the other hand, Lula was quoted in O Estado de Sao Paulo as saying, following a May 30 meeting with United Federation of Workers (CUT) president Vicente Paulo da Silva, "If it was up to me or to Vicente, the strike would already be over, but it's up to the oil workers to decide." The capitalist media highlighted such comments.
The economist Aloisio Mercadante, a prominent PT leader, told the Buenos Aires daily Clarín on June 3, after the strike was called off, that "the workers made mistakes" and that "the union was unable to work public opinion."
On June 2, the leadership of the FUP recommended the suspension of the strike. Workers held union meetings around the country that day and voted to go back to work in order to resume negotiations. Workers at the Cubatao and Sao José dos Campos refineries initially voted to stay out until the dismissals were reversed; after a subsequent union meeting, they decided to join the other unionists by returning to work.
At the four militarized refineries, workers returned to their jobs only after the government withdrew the troops.
`We needed a truce'
"At our meeting, when we voted to go back, the mood was
not discouraged but spirited," Carrara reported in the June
6 phone interview. "But the strike was suspended because
there were some who were tired. We needed a truce."
The day after the strike, the capitalist press in Brazil and elsewhere ran blaring headlines like "Cardoso crushes oil workers' strike." Declaring that the road is now clear to open up Petrobra's for private investment, some big- business commentators point to the next two goals of the government: to put other state-owned properties like telecommunications on the chopping block, and to get rid of the system of annual cost-of-living wage adjustments.
Other progovernment voices have been less triumphalist. "Cardoso knows he cannot celebrate very much the political victory over the oil workers strike," wrote one columnist in the June 3 Jornal do Brasil, remarking that according to opinion polls, at least one-third of those surveyed blamed the government for the conflict, not the strikers, and another third blamed both sides.
In fact, in recent weeks Cardoso has been met with angry demonstrators who have pelted him with rocks and eggs wherever he appears in public, including the weekend after the suspension of the oil strike.
"The strike has raised more debate and awareness in the broader population on social questions like oil as the national patrimony," unionist Carrara said. "Because of what we have done, there will be more resistance to the government's policies now than there was before the strike."