A History of São Paulo's Metalworker Unions/A história dos metalúrgicos de São Paulo

The following is a selection from A história dos metalúrgicos de São Paulo, a history of São Paulo's metalworker unions, provided by the Centro de Memória Sindical. All photos belong to the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo and are used with permission. 

This page is also available in Spanish HERE.

Introduction 

The Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo was founded at the beginning of Brazil’s process of industrialization and urbanization, when the country was starting to move away from its predominantly agrarian and still colonial situation. The founding took place on December 27, 1932, at Rua Venâncio Aires, no. 10, with the presence of about one hundred metalworkers. Official recognition by the Ministry of Labor would come a few months later, on May 2, 1933.

That same year, also in São Paulo, the so-called Constitutionalist Revolution took place, initiated by landowners and with strong participation from university students, merchants, and liberal professionals. On the one hand, that elite movement demanded the return of the old 1891 Constitution; on the other, the formalization of a workers’ union in a sector in which Getúlio Vargas’s government was heavily investing showed that a new era had arrived to stay. This was the tone of effervescence and dispute between projects of power that marked the 1930s.

Driven by the need for domestic production and diversification of consumer goods due to the First World War (1914–1918), this new era was characterized by the implementation of a project of Brazilian industrialization.

The war pressured the national economy and triggered a migratory wave that changed the profile of the working class. It was during this period that the first workers’ strikes and the formation of the Confederação Operária Brasileira (Brazilian Workers’ Confederation, COB), which existed between 1906 and 1920, took place.

In the 1920s, São Paulo — already with some commercial structure and a growing urban population resulting from the coffee crisis and the influx of European immigrants — emerged as the country’s largest industrial hub.

Although there were industries in Brazil before 1930, especially tied to the coffee economy, large estates and rural oligarchies still predominated.

Between 1919 and 1939, production in dynamic industries (metallurgy, mechanics, electrical materials, transport equipment, and chemicals) practically doubled, while the share of traditional industries (clothing, food, and furniture) in total output fell from 70% in 1919 to 56.7% in 1939.

Even though São Paulo lost factories and workers after the Great Depression of 1929, industrialization — beyond clothing and food — advanced after 1933 in basic raw materials (especially cement and steel) and in machinery and equipment production, supporting the developmentalist project of the 1930 Revolution.

Not only did the type of industrial production advance, but working conditions also began to change.

According to journalist José Luiz Del Roio, during the 1917 General Strike “oligarchic domination was practically total,” and most of Brazil’s population was rural, “immersed in poverty and ignorance.”

Linked to what Del Roio called “rural feudalism,” the industrial bourgeoisie maintained a slaveholding mentality toward workers. “So much so,” he explains, “that the first Italians who came here called these workers [the new immigrants] schiavi bianchi, or ‘white slaves.’” For him, this was a fierce class with no national project, unwilling to concede anything.

The hostility with which the State and employers treated workers echoed what philosopher Friedrich Engels described about the English working class in the 18th century. In How to Change the World, Eric Hobsbawm notes that the young Engels, in the late 1830s, was shocked by the “horrors of early industrial capitalism.” He pointed out that even then it was clear that poverty in advanced parts of Europe was no longer just an individual issue but a class issue — the unprecedented proletariat. And, as Hobsbawm emphasized, this was not only a regional or national problem, but an international one.

Industrial capitalism was expanding, setting a new pattern in labor-capital relations. In Brazil, labor relations in the early 20th century confirmed Engels’s observations. Historian Felipe Pereira Loureiro, in his master’s thesis, highlighted three features: the large-scale employment of women and minors as cheap and less qualified labor; poor working conditions in factories; and employers’ resistance to granting even minimal benefits to workers.

Factories lacked ventilation, lighting was irregular, sanitary facilities were dirty and foul, and mutilations were frequent.

This was the standard of early industry between the late 19th and early 20th centuries: an exploitative capital-labor relationship that gradually evolved, through social struggles and demands, into improvements — largely thanks to trade union action, which played a civilizing role in softening the barbarity of early industrialization.

Metalworkers in São Paulo, faced with these harsh working conditions, created representative entities and led movements for workers’ rights. Between 1895 and 1932, the year the union was founded, most strikes demanded shorter working hours, as shifts were exhausting and inhumane.

Del Roio recalls that during the Old Republic, the main demand was reducing working hours: “because if unchecked, employers would work people to death in factories. They worked 14 hours a day, including Saturdays and sometimes Sunday mornings.” The second demand was simply “a wage that would keep them from starving.” These were basic, survival demands — not political, but strictly economic.

Although the contradiction between capital and labor remained central, after 1930 the level of demands began to shift.

Sociologist Leôncio Rodrigues observed a growing institutionalization of the workers’ movement within a welfare state. In Industrial Capitalism and Unionism in Brazil (1960s), he argued that a “distinct set of interventions” softened class conflict in industrial societies. While critical of what he called institutionalization, Rodrigues recognized that it represented the integration of workers into urban society. Though he lamented the weakening of revolutionary impulses, history shows that this process helped shape a middle class in a new environment of citizenship.

Among the interventions Rodrigues cited were key measures introduced under Getúlio Vargas after 1930: the creation of the Ministry of Labor and Employment (1930); regulation of unionization for employers and workers (1931); the professional card (1932); the union tax (1940); and, above all, the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (Consolidation of Labor Laws, CLT) in 1943.

When Vargas took over the Provisional Government on November 3, 1930, breaking with slaveholding oligarchies, he invested in industrialization and established structural foundations for the country.

Historic demands of the working class aligned with Vargas’s national project, combining worker protection with building citizenship, creating a consumer market, and preparing an urban workforce.

For Rodrigues, the evolution of Brazilian unionism at that time lay in its increasing concern with turning the worker into a citizen — a member of an urban society as opposed to a rural one.

As Hobsbawm noted, Marx’s prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions did not materialize. After the 1840s, Marx and Engels no longer expected industrialization to generate the kind of pauperization that would radicalize the proletariat. Instead, segments of the working class were actually improving their standard of living.

In this contradictory dynamic, even employers resistant to change had to concede space for workers’ rights, as the system itself required it.

The founding of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo fits into this broader context. Emerging during the Vargas era, it embodied the new industrial and labor legislation framework while organizing a key sector of the workforce. The union became a vehicle for rights and achievements that gradually distanced Brazilian workers from the conditions of 18th-century England, helping transform them into citizens with economic and later political power.

A Union in Tune with the History of the Worker

The base of São Paulo’s metalworkers was disputed between remnants of the anarchist movement in Brazil and those who would go on to found the union on December 27, 1932.

The union began modestly, in a small rented room at Praça João Mendes, operating in the evenings, since the directors — who personally welcomed new members — worked in the factories during the day. It later moved to the Palacete Santa Helena, at Praça da Sé, at a time when the cathedral and the subway still did not exist. Symbolically, the union grew along with the city itself. Only in 1941 was the newspaper O Metalúrgico created, and in 1954 the union acquired its own headquarters on Rua do Carmo.

These first twenty years were particularly significant in shaping the union’s trajectory. In 1932, when it was founded, the signing of the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) that ended slavery was only 42 years in the past. To put this into perspective, that is almost the same distance of time between today and the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 — 38 years. Thus, in 1932, the establishment of an official workers’ organization, a union, represented a radical leap forward from Brazil’s still-recent slaveholding past.

The 1930s and 1940s were decades of major upheaval for the labor movement, and the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo experienced all of them, becoming the arena of intense political disputes among ministerialists, anarchists, integralists, and communists.

Before 1964, the union suffered at least three government interventions: in 1936, 1939, and 1946. Even so, metalworkers had already developed strategies to bypass such interventions, using the so-called “factory commissions.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, under the influence of the Communist Party, the Metalworkers’ Union of São Paulo played a central role in the major labor struggles that redefined the course of collective bargaining and union organization in Brazil. Alongside textile, graphic, and other unions, it was at the forefront of the 1953 Strike of 300,000 workers; the founding of DIEESE (Departamento Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Socioeconômicos) in 1955; the fight for the Christmas bonus in 1962; the Strike of 700,000 in 1963; and the broader mobilizations and political pressure during the government of João Goulart. Ultimately, the union was also a victim of the 1964 military coup, with its headquarters surrounded on the morning of March 31.

The union’s role during the dictatorship also requires careful attention. In April 1964, it suffered yet another intervention: first under Carlos Ferreira dos Santos for three months, and then under a junta of government-appointed administrators. New elections were held in January 1965, and to avoid the risk of a military figure being imposed as leader, members of the former board chose to ally with the “Joaquim group.”

This book also aims to revisit and reassess this history with a fairer and more realistic perspective.

After the dictatorship, the union again found itself at the center of disputes. In addition to the radical opposition and the group seeking continuity, a new group emerged with proposals for a new era. Although they did not win the elections — as the ruling faction managed to remain in power with indirect support from the opposition — those unionists stimulated debates and a process of reorganization that, a few years later, was incorporated into the union’s structure.

From the 1990s onward, particularly after the creation of the Força Sindical in 1991, the union expanded its scope beyond traditional wage campaigns and everyday struggles of São Paulo’s metalworkers. It became engaged in national causes, such as the Workers’ Marches, while Brazil entered the longest democratic period in its history. For the first time, union boards were free from the threat of government takeovers.

However, from an economic perspective, unlike the industrial growth seen between 1930 and 1980 — centered in São Paulo — from the mid-1980s onward the country underwent progressive deindustrialization, intense outsourcing, rising unemployment, and consequent disorganization of the working class. Like the broader labor movement, the São Paulo Metalworkers’ Union suffered losses in this context, facing new challenges of resistance and containment.

The peak of industrial and union dismantling came in 2017, when the Labor Reform struck the movement in an unprecedented way.

This was yet another period of confrontation, but despite the new scenario of political freedom, it posed enormous challenges. Still, the union endured and reached 2024 as one of the few entities with the weight and strength to maintain unity for more than 90 years — a union that remains the subject of ideological and symbolic disputes, while continuing to play a central role as a counterweight in the contradiction between capital and labor.