Local Labor Courts in Pernambuco, 1963–81: The Legal Strategies of a Professionalizing Rural Union Movement

The heartland of Brazil’s rural worker mobilization lay in the sugarcane region of Pernambuco, where communist and Catholic Church activists successfully unionized field workers in the early 1960s. The Goulart government’s Rural Worker Statute (1963) gave these workers labor benefits and access to the labor judiciary. When the military took control of the federal government six months later, those courts—the Local labor boards and regional tribunals—remained rural workers’ best option for pursuing complaints against employers. Careful attention to legal strategy, from the national confederation of rural workers’ unions all the way down to the local level, earned workers surprising victories during the period of military governance. Indeed, the toppling of the dictatorship came in part from the dogged legal campaigns of the rural unions. This paper draws on hundreds of local cases from two municipalities in Pernambuco’s sugarcane zone to chart the trajectory of the unions’ strategy between 1963 and 1981. Workers in the municipality of Catende in the zone’s southern subregion faced challenges that were different from those of Nazaré da Mata to the north. The breadth of cases from across the two subregions point to several union priorities: from challenging unwarranted dismissals; to petitioning for higher wage classifications, to demanding “family wages” for workers with children. A systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of these cases promises new insights into patterns of legal struggles. Did certain lawyers spearhead the introduction of new types of demands? Were workers from particular plantations particularly prone to bringing complaints? Were cases presented more frequently at specific times over the course of the planting and harvesting seasons (e.g. when the harvest was beginning or ending)? The details of these cases will help to build a more nuanced picture of national-level debates surrounding the “new unionism” and rural labor’s role in the newly democratic Brazil.