Skip to main content

Brazil labor reform removes rights enjoyed for seven decades

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.”


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.

More:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Suppression before uprising: how the system attempts to push societies away from the practice of protesting

globinfo freexchange
Six years ago we wrote that controlled information that reaches the media and reproduced by them, may include the overestimated capability of governments to monitor, for example, an extremely large number of phone conversations. Even if there is such a possibility, such huge amount of data is extremely difficult to be processed. However, the technology is evolving rapidly, and possibly will allow processing of large amount of data in very short time, in the near future. When technology will allow this, people will have already become familiar with the idea that any conversation can be investigated and processed any time.
Today, it seems that not only we reached that point, but the establishment apparatus seeks to 'train' us to accept an elevated form of suppression, through a rapidly growing surveillance technology.

A recent article published in NY Times proves that the establishment apparatus will seek to expand the suppression state in unprecedented leve…
Post a Comment
Read more

Technocracy now: The US is working to turn Lebanon’s anti-corruption protests against Hezbollah

While Lebanon’s protests remain focused on the economy and widespread corruption, Washington is increasingly determined to exploit the movement as a geopolitical weapon in the region.
by Rania Khalek
Part 1
Lebanon erupted in massive protests this October. The demonstrations transcended sect and class, and quickly spread across the country. The movement was spurred by the levying of regressive taxes and the persistence of a corrupt neoliberal order that has mismanaged the economy and hollowed out the public sector while enriching a handful of elites amid a looming economic collapse. 
Though the protests remain focused on class issues and corruption, the US is increasingly determined to co-opt the movement for its own goals. At the forefront of Washington’s agenda is ousting Hezbollah from the Lebanese governing coalition and marginalizing the Shia political-military movement as a means of weakening Iran. In its place, the US and its proxies inside Lebanon are demanding a “technocratic” g…
Post a Comment
Read more

Promoting 'authoritative propaganda': YouTube openly admits it systematically suppresses independent media!

globinfo freexchange

On mid-July we wrote that an increased number of people who run independent YouTube channels reported that are being demonetized. Also, they see the number of viewings and subscribers being reduced significantly.

We observed that while the blog subscribed to various independent YouTube channels, when we go to the first page and search specific terms like "Syria", "Venezuela", "Bernie Sanders", "Tulsi Gabbard", etc., the first results give numerous videos from Western mainstream media like MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, BBC, etc. We can hardly find a video from our subscriptions, way below those results.

We concluded that all signs show that we have to deal with a well-organized operation.

On the one hand, YouTube algorithm directs audiences to the mainstream media propaganda, in an effort to bound them tightly to the establishment narratives. On the other hand, independent YouTube channels will be gradually eliminated due to the sig…
Post a Comment
Read more

WikiLeaks evidence that the imperialist machine was monitoring anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn at least since the US invasion of Iraq

The WIKILEAKS Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD)holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words. The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published. The PlusD collection, built and curated by WikiLeaks, is updated from a variety of sources, including leaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and documents released by the US State Department systematic declassification review. 
globinfo freexchange
A cable from December, 2002, proves that the US officials were closely monitoring anti-war activities. The particular cable was describing a protest "against a possible U.S.-led operation against Iraq" in Istanbul, Turkey, and there is a spec…
Post a Comment
Read more

While Evo’s MAS party regroups, Bolivia’s coup leaders are eating each other alive

Humiliating scandals are destroying right-wing leader Luis Fernando Camacho and the right is fracturing as a more militant MAS party readies for an uphill election battle.
by Wyatt Reed
Part 2 - From right-wing golden boy to “damaged goods”
Luis Fernando Camacho rose to political prominence months ago, but cemented his status as coup figurehead after he broke into the Palacio Quemado, Bolivia’s presidential palace, with police assistance. In a bizarre act of colonialist kabuki theater, he placed a Bolivian flag and enormous Bible on the floor and declared that God had returned to the Presidential Palace.

Moments later, the pastor by Camacho’s side promised that “Pachamama will never return to the palace,” in a reference to the Andean spirit of Mother Earth.

As the former leader of the undeniably fascistic Union Juvenil Crucenista paramilitary and the separatist Santa Cruz Committee, Camacho has struggled to shake off a history of white supremacy and anti-indigenous violence. 
Marco Pum…
Post a Comment
Read more

US-backed parties have infiltrated Lebanon’s protests, pushing the country toward war amid economic collapse

By joining the roadblocks around Beirut, protesters allowed themselves to be used by US-allied parties playing a dangerous game that has the potential to explode into open warfare
by Rania Khalek
Part 3 - Fear of Amal, hatred of corrupt leadership, and lack of ideology
In Tyre, protesters tore down Berri’s posters and torched the Tyre Rest House Resort, which they believe is owned by Randa Berri, though Nabih Berri denied it. When I visited Tyre two weeks later, hundreds of new posters of Berri had been erected that read, “the guarantor of Lebanon” and “we are all with you [Berri].”

The posters surrounded the small protest encampment located in a roundabout on the beach road. The protest was part art fair, part concert for families, with liberals and a few leftists filling the ranks. Demonstrators were careful not to name leaders like Berri in their chants and when interviewed, they often spoke in vague terms out of fear of Amal. Later in the night, Amal members provoked the protesters…
Post a Comment
Read more

George Galloway: where are the pussyhats to defend Manning and Assange?

RT America
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange argued before a London judge via video he should not be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges because the offenses are political in nature. Assange's attorney, Edward Fitzgerald, also told the judge Assange is protected by a 2007 extradition treaty between the US and the UK. Former UK MP George Galloway weighs in.

Post a Comment
Read more

While Evo’s MAS party regroups, Bolivia’s coup leaders are eating each other alive

Humiliating scandals are destroying right-wing leader Luis Fernando Camacho and the right is fracturing as a more militant MAS party readies for an uphill election battle.
by Wyatt Reed
Part 3 - MAS re-emerges from the coup more militant and motivated for victory
In Cochabamba on December 7, thousands of members of Bolivia’s MAS party descended on the Coliseo de la Coronilla to determine the future of the left-wing political powerhouse, which led the impoverished Latin American country to unprecedented levels of shared prosperity under the tutelage of President Evo Morales.

From exile in Mexico, Morales phoned in to announce to raucous cheers that he had accepted his nomination as MAS campaign director for the upcoming proposed elections. Outside, vendors hawking indigenous Wiphala flags and DVDs documenting the recent army massacres in Sacana and Senkata struggled to be heard above the roar of flyovers by Bolivian military, who buzzed the massive crowd periodically with the same aircra…
Post a Comment
Read more

Bolivia’s free territory of Chapare has ousted the coup regime and is bracing for a bloody re-invasion

Spending time with the union members of Chapare, who run society in a collective fashion, offers special insights into the resistance to the coup. They succeeded in expelling the police, but now fear a bloodbath in retaliation.

by Ollie Vargas
Part 1

Known as Bolivia’s Chapare region, the Tropico of Cochabamba is a sanctuary for elected President Evo Morales’ most dedicated base of support. Since the November 10 coup, it has effectively become a self-governing territory where the military junta is absent.

The police and military were sent in full retreat from this area the coup began and were told they would only be welcomed back if the they “get on their knees and apologize” to the community.

In this 12,000 square kilometer swath of land, hundreds of unions have flourished over the years. I spent several days with the union rank and file, witnessing how they run society in a collective fashion, and how they have organized ferocious resistance to a right-wing coup government that threat…
Post a Comment
Read more

US-backed parties have infiltrated Lebanon’s protests, pushing the country toward war amid economic collapse

By joining the roadblocks around Beirut, protesters allowed themselves to be used by US-allied parties playing a dangerous game that has the potential to explode into open warfare
by Rania Khalek
Part 4 - Cooperation and integration versus the West’s recipe for fragmentation
The Lebanese economy is facing imminent collapse. Unemployment is spreading, prices are spiking and the street price of the Lebanese lira continues to devalue. There is little that can be done to avoid the collapse, which has been thirty years in the making.

The implosion of the Lebanese economy is spilling over into Syria, which was already teetering on the edge of economic collapse due to eight years of war, government mismanagement and US sanctions designed to collapse the country. Syria was relying on Lebanon as its access point to purchase goods for imports. Now that too is gone. Lebanon’s economic crisis is also affecting Syrian elites who placed their money in Lebanese banks during the war and cannot access i…
Post a Comment
Read more