OS TRABALHADORES CANAVIEIROS DE PERNAMBUCO E O “NOVO SINDICALISMO”

revisitando a questão

Abstract

The strikes that took place between 1978 and the first years of the 1980s projected the Metalworkers Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema and the figure of Lula as expressions of a new field of reference in the Brazilian syndicalism, known as "new trade unionism", and this was the matrix for the creation of the Workers' Party - PT and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores - CUT. In the same period, in the Northeast of the country, in the traditional sugar cane plantation, the workers were rearticulating a history of struggles that had had an important expression in the pre-64 period and that had not been completely interrupted during the Military Regime. The 1979 Pernambuco sugarcane workers' strike was a milestone in the resumption of the union struggle in the countryside. However, the cycle of sugarcane strikes in the Northeast, which lasted until the mid-1980s, did not achieve the same political repercussion and academic relevance as the ABC strikes and the "new unionism," in which the studies of John Humphrey, Amnéris Maroni, Ricardo Antunes, Laís Abramo, Iram Jácome Rodrigues, among others, debated their political developments (LADOSKY e VÉRAS DE OLIVEIRA, 2014). This paper takes up the memory of the sugarcane workers' strikes in Pernambuco and the union practices associated with them, seeking to discuss their significance for the trajectory of Brazilian unionism since then. It seeks to revisit the interpretations produced on those events in order to raise some issues, mainly in relation to the theme of "new unionism".