Afogados em leis: A CLT e a cultura politica dos trabalhadores brasileiros (review)

On the job at a steel plant near São Paulo, Dede Gimenez Ferreira always carried in his shirt pocket a small vinyl-covered guide to Brazil's labor laws, distributed by the metalworkers' union. Coworkers turned to him for advice about the law when they doubted the actions of their supervisors or had a question about their rights. For many workers, the laws detailed in the book offered promises of fair treatment and added benefits that they had a right to see fulfilled. John D. French's latest book discusses the importance of the law to industrial workers like Ferreira and the unions that represented them in Brazil's highly regulated system of employment relations. The book summarizes the debates that have evaluated the significance of Brazil's extensive architecture of labor laws, the 1943 Consolidação das Leis Trabalhistas (CLT).

At a little more than one hundred pages in length, it is but a primer of the larger project French envisions. It heralds the appearance of empirical studies challenging old assumptions about the law, such as French's own nearly completed book on metalworkers in the São Paulo metropolitan area from 1950 to 1980. Divided into seven chapters, plus an excellent bibliography and a profile of a Rio Grande do Sul labor militant written by the historian Joan Bak, Afogados em leis wraps up with a lengthy bibliographical essay. Most chapters are graced with fascinating photographs of workers, labor confrontations, militants, and significant rallies from the crucial 1930-64 period. Many also include provocative primary texts, demonstrating in particular the experiences of labor leaders with the CLT. The mix of documents, narrative, historiography, and analysis makes the book engaging to read.

The book aims to explain the history behind the contradiction between a body of progressive labor law (the CLT) and a labor relations system that often seems as backward as any in the world. French targets the space between the ideal and the real, between the law as text and the law enforced, between ruling-class intention and working-class innovation. French delves into the literature discussing these issues, examining changing interpretations of the law, its origins, influence, and significance for workers and unions. He evaluates the views of Brazilian policy makers, legal scholars, jurists, lawyers, and historians, as well as the work of brasilianistas like himself.

Readers familiar with Brazilian labor history will recognize various aspects of the debate French dissects. Some have described the CLT as a means of repressing and controlling labor, while others have seen it as a means of inspiring workers and creating a movement. Some see the law as something granted by the government, explains French, while others look upon the CLT as an artificial imposition. Still others argue that the law arose in response to class struggle. Afogados offers an insightful analysis of these and other positions, maintaining that most interpretations have overemphasized the ideal and underestimated the real due to a lack of commitment to research. Only by looking at the law from the experience of workers, labor leaders, and unions can one assess the historical role of the CLT.

Since the late 1980s, French reports, a new generation of Brazilian and U.S. scholars has begun to produce the kind of bottom-up studies necessary to understand the CLT. These social histories have revealed stories like that of Ferreira, stories that document both the repressive and the progressive reality of the law, the ways in which it has inspired workers to identify and defend a restricted set of specific rights. Where some have "drowned in laws," French swims to the surface in a powerful little book that sets a purposeful course for Brazilian labor history.