Dilma
Rousseff tweets: Brazil is in mourning. After 74 years of victories,
by 50 votes the Senate handed workers a defeat.
The
Brazilian Senate's approval of President Michel Temer's unamended
labor reform bill, on Tuesday night, has drawn angry reactions from
trade unions and the Brazilian left. Former president, Dilma
Rousseff, tweeted that “Brazil is in mourning. After 74 years of
victories, by 50 votes, the Senate handed workers a defeat.
Even before
the reform passed, Vagner Freitas, president of Brazil's Central
Worker's Union, CUT, stressed that the “proposal being voted in
the Senate puts an end to formal employment.”
Senator
Gleisi Hoffman, recently-elected president of the Worker's Party,
said that what happened in Brazil's Senate on Tuesday, “shames
the nation.” She added that the minds of all senators who voted
in favor of labor reform is founded in a “regime of slavery.”
O Brasil está de luto. Depois de 74 anos de conquistas, por 50 votos, o Senado impõe derrota aos trabalhadores. A CLT está morta.— Dilma Rousseff (@dilmabr) July 12, 2017
That idea is
developed further by Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos in an article
entitled, “From Slavery to Labor Reform”. Bastos argues that
while Brazil, the last country in the western world to abolish
slavery, attempted to “civilize work relations” with its 1988
Constitution, the nation's prevailing social inequalities were
ignored. With the rise of Temer in 2016, the tendency to treat those
inequalities as problems of "law and order", to be dealt
with by the police, became even more pronounced.
Following
Rousseff's impeachment, in what many regard as a parliamentary coup,
labor reform became the central pillar of a host of austerity
measures and neoliberal policies, which return labor relations to
something resembling the days of legalized slavery.
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