But by 1976 Lula and his union were in a position to begin flexing their muscles. Union representatives were recruiting more members. In a salary campaign that year, São Bernardo appealed to the labor court, the Tribunal Superior de Trabalho, to prevent a deal agreed on by the employers, the Federaçao dos Metalúrgicos de São Paulo, from being extended to all engineering workers. Much to the irritation of the employers, the court accepted at least part of the union's case—limiting the deal to unorganized workers, guaranteeing that young men called up to do military service would get their jobs back, and providing more security for pregnant women. When Lula held a second union congress (attended by the governor of São Paulo, 250 workers, and more police and army spies), militants spoke out against the lack of freedom.
Lula, who discovered that he was rather good with people and in the rough-and-tumble of union politics, also managed to cut Vidal down to size. Toward the end of 1976, the Ford motor company decided to reduce its medical services for staff. Lula told a journalist that he would not hold meetings inside the factory, in case management tried to influence the workforce to accept its plans. Vidal told another journalist exactly the opposite. This conflict became public, and Lula got the executive to approve a new rule—that only he, or in his absence the vice president, was entitled to speak on behalf of the union. Vidal, as secretary, lost his standing.
Lula took trouble to maintain contact with his members, not only by meeting them at the factory gate. He also gave a lift to the union's newsletter, Tribúna Metalúrgica, by encouraging a cartoon figure, Joao Ferrador. This Bolshy worker caught the fancy of members, and his sly and illhumored comments on life and the workplace made trade unionists see their organization as more human, down-to-earth, and sympathetic.
In 1977, Lula, who was still fixated on the rights and incomes of workers and not much interested in national politics, found a cause that energized him. It enabled him to mobilize support not only among the metalworkers, but more widely across the union movement. It made him a national figure.
An economics professor, Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, wrote an analysis of a World Bank study in the economics section of the Folha de São Paulo that showed that the military government had been manipulating Brazil's inflation figures. The Fundaçao Getúlio Vargas (FGV), a semiofficial institution, had defined the rate of inflation in 1973 as having been 22.5 percent, but the military government had announced that it was 12.6 percent. The issue was serious, because the salàrio mínimo—the official minimum wage—was adjusted once a year on the basis of the FGV index; with strikes prohibited by the military, the labor court (Justiça do Trabalho) simply passed on the inflation increase to all workers. Lula commissioned a study that showed that, with the passage of more than three years, the cumulative loss as a result amounted to 34.1 percent of the value of the minimum salary.19
Lula decided to fight, but was initially cautious as to the means. More than forty thousand workers signed a petition for the reinstatement of the lost earnings; crowded meetings were held in factories and the industrial areas, and thirteen unions were drawn into the campaign. The sense of grievance gained momentum. President Geisel refused to see the union leaders, but four of his key ministers—finance, planning, industry and commerce, and labor—spent three and half fruitless hours in discussion with them.
When Lula ran again as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers in February 1978, with a slate of fourteen directors, he won 97.3 percent of the tally and twenty-five thousand votes.20 At the union presidential inauguration ceremony for his second term, Lula told a large crowd that it was time to end the exploitation by employers. More privately, he got his union executive to agree to a switch from a welfare approach to a riskier, more confrontational strategy aimed at boosting the workers' wages. He had acquired more skill and confidence, at a time when both police spies and leftist groups with their own agendas were seeking to infiltrate and influence the union.
In July that year he attended the fourth congress of the Confederaçao Nacional dos Trabalhadores da Indùstria, where he was a highlight of the meeting and strengthened his contacts with the autênticos—other union leaders trying to build a free labor movement. There was a burgeoning excitement that trade unionists could create a new kind of movement, more responsive and democratic, and that in the process they could remake Brazil.
At this congress the autênticos adopted a wide-ranging charter of principles. It called for a secret, free, and direct vote (one of the ways in which the military had emasculated Congress and the presidential “elections” was by use of an indirect voting system); a new constitution; amnesty for exiles and those who had lost their political rights; human rights guarantees; a new wage policy; the right to strike; and union representatives and works committees inside factories. Political opposition to the military system was growing, with Geisel forced to close Congress; a Trotskyite group, Convergencia Socialista, was challenging the PCB for militant support in the industrial belt.
But Lula gave absolute priority to the salary needs of his members, and in 1978 he had his hands full because this was the year of the first great strike wave by metalworkers. It began on 12 May, with a strike at Scania, and it ran on until 23 December. Almost every day a new strike broke out in another factory—Lula described it as a kind of fever among the workforce.21 The strike wave does not seem to have been directly stimulated or organized by Lula in the beginning, but he and his executive were soon in the thick of it, trying to make deals for the workers involved.
It paid the union leadership to make the authorities think that the strikes were totally spontaneous. They were all, of course, technically illegal under the dictatorship and members of the executive could have been arrested. Because the flare-ups were all over the place and unpredictable, it was more difficult for the police and government to crack down on them. Lula telephoned the new, more liberal commander of the Second Army to give the unionists' side of the story. General Dilermando Gomes Monteiro then told journalists that the strikers were peaceful, there was no evidence of subversive foreign interference, and it was impossible for soldiers or police to force people to work.
The workers also invented innovative tactics—for example, going to work but not doing anything at their benches or machines, or, in the final strike of the year at Resil (a firm that made extinguishers), surrounding the building with a picket of five hundred men sitting down, so that those who had been hired to replace the strikers could not enter.22
The actual deals that were struck varied—the Scania workers got a 20 percent increase in real terms, others only 15 percent. But their success changed attitudes in the São Paulo working class. Furthermore, the agreements had been reached by direct negotiation between union and employers, without diktats from the Vargista labor court.
There was an informal, popular quality to these strikes. Lula and his colleagues made many of the decisions in a bar in São Bernardo run by Tia Rosa, “Aunt” Rosa, like Lula a northeasterner. They were a group of friends, not union bureaucrats. Marisa too was involved insofar as her family commitments allowed, and for Lula it was a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week occupation.
Lula was disappointed that employees in one of the biggest factories, Volkswagen, never went out on strike as a whole. He criticized the disorganization of his own union, the irresponsibility of far-left students who rabble-roused in factories where they had much less to lose than other workers, the lack of clarity about the objects of a strike, and the disregard of risk. But he was immensely proud of what the hitherto downtrodden workers had achieved, he was tireless himself, and he had become a media figure with fans in unexpected places.23 The union executive became more professional: its members gave up their own factory jobs to work full-time for the union.
Family commitments