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 inevitably took second place. Just when the first strike broke out at Scania, Lula received a letter from Dona Mocinha that told him that his father, Aristides, had died. Aristides, retired, was living alone and was a shadow of the man who had terrorized his children. He suffered the physical consequences of alcoholism and wasted what money he had on prostitutes. Lula asked his brothers to attend to a funeral, but when they got to Santos they found that Aristides had been buried twelve days earlier as a pauper. Lula's father had had little influence on his career, except that he respected his mother the more for the way she responded to his father's treatment of her, and he was determined to have more to show for his own life.
In July, after the first wave of strikes had been settled, Lula and Marisa had their second son, Sandro Luís. There was no question of paternity leave. Lula was actually fourteen hundred miles away, at a conference of petroleum workers in Salvador, when the baby was born. Lula, Marisa, and their three children were now living together in a small house in Jardim Lavínia, São Bernardo do Campo. It had been bought two years earlier with a loan from the state housing bank. Marisa found it hard to adjust to Lula's heavy travel schedule. The following year she started going to the strike meetings herself.
The strike wave in 1978 had a number of wider consequences, in addition to giving a new direction to the Brazilian labor movement. It was not possible to classify it as a result of foreign intervention by Castroites or by the Brazilian leftist exiles who had been forced abroad after the overthrow of Goulart in 1964. It was not connected to the small groups of armed insurrectionists, now largely killed or rounded up by the military regime. It could not be blamed on agitation by Catholic radicals, members of the communist movement (which had now split into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese wings), or Trotskyites—although all these had contributed. It was predominantly a home-grown, rather unideological rebellion against the compression of wages in the advanced manufacturing sector.24
For this reason it was seen as a threat by employers and their allies in the military government. It challenged the high rates of return on capital in the early years of the Brazilian “miracle,” which had led to an influx of foreign money. The fruits of growth had not been shared with labor because unions had been decapitated and strikes prohibited. Employers and the government had been caught off guard by the sudden upsurge of labor unrest that started at Scania. They resolved to act differently in the future, mobilizing police and other agencies of force. At the same time, the excitement among workers was infectious and beyond the capacity of Lula and other leaders to control.
What happened in 1979 was a great deal rougher. Whereas in 1978 more than 539,000 workers had participated in 24 strikes, the following year more than 3.2 million workers, more than a quarter of them metalworkers in the auto and engineering industries, participated in 113 strikes. The labor struggles, which involved sharp repression by the government and temporary closure of the São Bernardo metalworkers' union, also interweaved with political developments. On 15 March 1979, in a flamboyant ceremony in Brasilia, General Geisel handed over the presidency to the last of the military presidents, Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo. In an extraordinarily ambitious move, Lula had hoped to roll out a general strike to coincide with the handover. It was an example of his own growing confidence, boosted by media interest in what was nicknamed the “trade union republic” of the ABC districts around São Paulo; he himself had now grown a beard to add to his moustache.25
In fact, three days before the change of president, Lula and other union leaders reached a good agreement with the employers' organization in São Paulo, FIESP. This would have given increases of 63 percent to the poorest metalworkers, and 44 percent
