tried to convince his members to support the deal at a large meeting in a soccer stadium—he stood on a table in the middle and those nearest to him had to pass his message outward, as there were no loudspeakers—they shouted him down. “Strike, strike, strike,” they cried. It was an awkward moment for Lula. “So, we are on strike,” he replied. He warned that it might last a long time.
Employers and state authorities were still unable to produce a coordinated response. The regional labor court (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho)—an instrument of the corporatist labor system—awarded an increase of 44 percent, but declared the strike illegal. FIESP, the employers, offered considerably more. Armed military police broke up a small cordon round the Pirelli factory, and police threw tear gas at workers outside the Volkswagen factory.
Although paid advertisements on radio stations urged the strikers to return to work, the strike stayed solid. Lula told meetings that the whole future of the working class depended on success. His rhetoric was exalted. “We will give our life, if necessary,” he said.26 By 21 March, Lula and two other union leaders had a private meeting with a new minister of labor, Murilo Macedo, and eight employers in São Paulo. Although Lula authorized one of his aides to make an agreement, he did not try to sell it to a mass meeting, which insisted on a continuance of the strike. Cleverly, he asked for a vote of confidence in the executive, but he returned home feeling devastated, and others called him a traitor.27
After that the conflict sharpened. Authorities shut down the São Bernardo union. Lula moved in with his father-in-law. The Catholic Church launched a relief fund for the families of strikers, and put churches at the disposal of the union for meetings. Not permitted to use the Vila Euclides soccer stadium, twenty thousand metalworkers gathered in the Samuel Sabatini square in São Bernardo, also known as the Paço Municipal. They were met by one thousand shock troops, more than a hundred armored cars, and a vehicle firing sand and colored water. The workers stayed put.
The shock troops threw tear gas canisters, which the strikers threw back at them. The mayor and a colonel asked for calm and trust in the authorities. The workers sang the national anthem. They called out Lula's name. The colonel telephoned the head of the military police, and obtained permission to withdraw his forces. The bishop of São Bernardo, Dom Cláudio Hummes, led the gathering in the Lord's prayer, and the crowd dispersed. Dismissed as unimportant by the government, it was a moral victory for the strike and encouraged opposition politicians to criticize the state intervention in the union.
The 1979 strike had not always seen Lula at his best. At one point he was directly warned by the general commanding the Second Army that if he turned up at meetings he would be arrested. He went missing for a few days, and other strike leaders tried to represent him. When a delegation went looking for him he was found at home, playing with his children, and a left-wing actress, Lélia Abramo, told him that he had to turn up at the next assembly and resume his leadership.
The strikes spread beyond São Paulo and beyond the metalworkers. The unions could not afford any strike pay, and there was real hardship. The metalworkers' strike was not called off until 12 May, two months after it had begun. Most of the workers got an increase of 63 percent, with a discount of 50 percent for the days they had not worked, and their promise to put in extra hours in compensation. A mass meeting, at which tears were shed, accepted the agreement and gave unanimous backing to Lula and his executive.28
There was no let-up in conflict in the rest of 1979. One auto firm would fire a worker so that another could take him on at lower pay. The Ministry of Labor intervened in bank workers' unions in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre. When the metalworkers of São Paulo decided in September to go on strike, over the opposition of their president, Joaquim dos Santos Andrade, they were met with violence. Troops broke up picket lines, churches were invaded to disperse union meetings, and strikers were persecuted in their home districts. In one factory gate confrontation, a Catholic union leader was shot dead, strengthening the church's support for workers' rights.
The salary campaign of 1980 for the São Bernardo metalworkers was more bitter still. The perception among the government and employers that Lula was in any sense tractable or nonpolitical had vanished. There was a feeling on both sides that the union movement was challenging the state and the regime. At the same time, the Figueiredo government, launched by Geisel with the hope that it would complete a return to democracy, was running into difficulty. In August 1979, the government had agreed to a political amnesty, and celebrated exiles, such as Leonel Brizola, Goulart's brother-in-law, Miguel Arraes, former governor of Pernambuco, and Luís Carlos Prestes, veteran leader of the pro-Soviet PCB, had returned within a couple of months.
But Figueiredo's hope that he would disarm the opposition by conceding an amnesty backfired. Instead the opposition wanted more, and quickly. Army critics of democratization exploited the situation. The Machiavellian General Golbery, who was trying to manipulate a controlled relaxation from the intelligence service, was dismissed. Hardliners were getting into positions of power, and right-wingers were organizing provocative acts of terrorism to destabilize the process. The economy was running into trouble.
In 1979, Lula was already in advanced planning for a PT, a workers' party, whose birth is described in the next chapter.29 Its formal act of foundation took place on 10 February 1980. As a labor leader, Lula saw an increase in wages as only one of the demands a union should make. He wanted a forty-hour workweek and freedom for workers to elect their representatives in factories. He was fighting for job security. He sought the right to strike, free collective bargaining, and an end to the corporatist labor legislation. Having built alliances among metalworkers' unions in various cities, and with other types of workers, he wanted an end to the divisive union structure that had been imposed by Getúlio Vargas and maintained by subsequent governments.
He also realized that, in the kind of struggle in which the metalworkers were engaged, they needed a new kind of organization. In the previous two years, they had depended too much on him and a handful of other leaders. Hence the union introduced a system of decentralization, a pyramid in which an executive related to a commission of 450 people elected in factory meetings, who were responsible for factory-level coordination. It meant that, if the union was closed by state intervention and its leaders were arrested, a strike could be maintained.
On 1 April 1980, the metalworkers of São Bernardo went on strike again. The previous day, sixty thousand of them had gathered in the soccer stadium of Vila Euclides, backing the strike and singing Brazil's hymn of independence. Nonviolence was a crucial tactic, and one reason for the sturdy support of the Catholic Church. Although the government was all set to declare the strike illegal and occupy the union offices, the union's lawyer, Almir Pazzianoto, succeeded in persuading the regional labor court (the Tribunal Regional do Trabalho) that it was incompetent to decide the legality of the strike.
On 2 April, Pazzianoto addressed another vast crowd at the Vila Euclides to explain the court's decision, thinking it would enable Lula to call off the strike. But at that point two army helicopters, with eight armed soldiers in each, began flying low over the stadium for twenty minutes, in a blatant attempt to intimidate. Lula's adopted son Marcos, then six years old, hung on to his mother's skirt while Lula called on the unionists to stay calm. An elderly right-wing general had taken over the Second Army and ordered up the helicopters. But the effect was to make the strikers more determined to carry on.
The atmosphere was difficult for militants. A new government incomes policy provided for cost of living increases for workers and made it hard for firms to pass on higher wage awards in higher prices. At the same time, a recession was impending and jobs were becoming scarcer. In neighboring São Caetano, on 9 April, a mass meeting of metalworkers chaired by Lula's communist brother, Frei Chico, voted to return to work. Frei Chico said that the men were going back anyway.
On 14 April, the regional labor court changed its mind and declared the strike illegal.
