In recent years a political practice that is embedded firmly in both class politics and the feminist movement has emerged in Brazil. It has links to some feminist organizations, labor unions and parties on the left, and insists on the importance of the feminist transformation of leftist political parties and labor unions from the inside. It is critical of the free market, and does not reject the use of multiple forms of struggle. There is no doubt that this class-based feminism has benefited greatly from the ideas and the gains of the larger feminist movement. It has incorporated feminist understandings of the public and private spheres into its discourses about working women, demanded the inclusion of issues such as reproductive health and sexual rights in discussions about women in the workplace, instituted training courses on gender issues for both men and women within labor unions and political parties, and fought to make leadership positions as well as political education accessible to women activists.
The engagement of labor-movement and community-based feminists in these activities suggests that they have not abandoned the class-based perspectives embedded in the revolutionary politics of years past. Not only are they constructing a feminist politics which actively draws from perspectives of class, gender and increasingly of race, but they are exerting a powerful influence on the broader feminist movement. Autonomous transnational feminist networks now address many of the issues of concern to the labor-based feminists, though without any concern for working-class organization. It is urgent that Brazilian women workers themselves begin to participate in class-based transnational feminist networks.
The rate of unionization among Brazilian women has notably increased in recent years, and the growth in the rate of women’s labor-force participation has been dramatic. In the 1970s, the percentage of adult women in the labor force was 20%, but by 1990, the figure surpassed 40%.[1] Many women workers have gained employment in service-sector jobs, often in major multinational corporations. They are also employed in large numbers as household workers. The employment of women in many highly modernized industries like banks and packing plants, as well as the increase in the number of women working in the informal sector, suggests the existence of a combination of traditional and modern forms of work. But despite the growing incorporation of women workers into the institutions of paid employment, there seems to be little change in male-female income inequality, in the sexual division of labor within the household, or in the power relations of gender hierarchies.
Beyond this, the positive trends have developed alongside rising unemployment rates, growing job insecurity within increasingly flexible labor markets, attacks on the gains of the labor movement and a dramatic rise in job-related illness. In other words, while there have been substantial political gains, this has not mitigated the adverse effects of a neoliberal and increasingly globalized economy on the lives of working-class Brazilian women.
All this suggests that the “issue” of women is not just about granting “citizenship” or “human rights” to women, but also about the need to rethink leftist ideologies and practices. The experience of recent years suggests that the left must incorporate the unemployed and the informal sector as well as those groups organizing around issues like local, ethnic or sexual identity into the classic frameworks of class analysis.
The case of Brazil is particularly significant to this project because in addition to its firm insertion into the neoliberal process of globalization, it is one of the few countries in Latin America where women’s issues are accorded a prominent place in political life and official discourse. Through its rhetoric and a series of less-than-effective social programs, the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso has situated itself as the champion of women and blacks. It has supported antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action policies at the same time that it has cut funding for public education and eliminated public-sector jobs in social services and local public administration—both major sources of employment for women.
Clearly, the increasing labor-force participation of women cannot be seen only as a gain. The trend is in large part the result of the impoverishment of working families. Low-income married women with children are entering the labor force at a time when services, child care and schools are suffering cutbacks. Older girls within these families are then forced to bear the brunt of child care in the absence of their mothers.[2]
There remain great income disparities between men and women as well as between social groups in Brazil, much of which is accounted for by the distribution of occupations. Women are still concentrated in unskilled, low-wage jobs. Paid housework remains one of the major source of jobs for poor women, particularly black women. In addition, women’s employment is highly susceptible to national and international economic fluctuations. The traditional sources of women’s jobs such as retail commerce and the service sector were disproportionately affected by the high levels of unemployment between 1990 and 1997. On the other hand, women have increasingly been able to find industrial and manufacturing jobs that in the past were almost exclusively reserved for men. The hiring of women in manufacturing is intensified during economic downturns, when companies try to save on labor costs.
In rural areas, the numbers of women engaged in unpaid labor remains disproportionately high. In 1995, 41% of working women in rural areas were not being paid wages for their labor, in contrast to 21% of men. According to a report published by the National Commission of Rural Working Women of the Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) in 1997, women account for 40% of rural labor, working for an average of 15 hours per day.[3]
Many companies have an explicit preference for women workers, particularly in the service sectors of the economy. Close to 50% of bank employees, for example, are women. They tend to be assigned simple and repetitive administrative duties, and despite the fact that they average more years of schooling than their male counterparts, close to 70% of them have low-level filing jobs, are much more closely supervised than the predominantly male tellers, and have fewer opportunities of career advancement. In recent years, however, there has been a growing presence of women in the sale of financial services, a field allowing for somewhat greater autonomy and remuneration. These women are generally expected to work longer hours, which has led to an increase in stress-related illnesses.[4]
Recent investigation has documented a dramatic rise in repetitive stress disorder (RSD) among women in many fields of both paid and unpaid labor. RSD is most prevalent in jobs that involve word processing, data entry and cash-register operation. It is provoked and aggravated by work-related stress and anxiety, and is associated with muscular stress, long work days and the lack of regular rest periods.[5] Close to 80% of workers who suffer from RSD in Brazil are women, and it is clearly associated with the double burden of a long working day and domestic responsibilities. Public health advocates have warned that RSD is assuming epidemic proportions in Brazil, accounting for almost 70% of disabilities due to occupational illness.
Women who work in stressful service jobs, however, are not always critical of their working conditions. The combination of a socialized sense of responsibility and the desperation for employment seems, in fact, to have bonded many women workers with their employers. Research in São Paulo’s largest banks has found a high degree of company identification and an acceptance of gender-based roles within the workplace. A woman branch manager told an interviewer that “women are better at sales because people often repress their emotions, and women are more sensitive. They know if the client is sad or anxious. One can’t treat all customers in the same way. Women are better able to communicate; to convince customers; to reel them in.”[6]
New models of workplace organization implemented by business elites are meant to appeal to this sensibility by emphasizing participation, “moral satisfaction,” the analogy between the factory and the family, communication, cooperation and leadership based on professional authority rather than hierarchical control. Far from instilling any sort of worker solidarity, however, this new language of production is intended to encourage competition among employees in order to increase productivity, and to discourage anything which might disrupt the relationship with management. Within this model, union organization and collective bargaining are replaced by direct and individual negotiation.
In an essay about industrial development in Brazil, sociologist Magda Neves documents the implementation of Japanese models of workplace organization through which “a controlled and coercive form of participation is imposed which seeks to achieve the maximum level of consensus through a complete partnership between management and the workers.”[7] Jobs in this sector are relatively stable and offer benefits which are attractive to many workers. Neves points out that this “new rationality” appeals to workers on two levels. “The first is the emphasis on quality production, which through quality control or discourses of ‘total quality,’ seeks to invest the worker with a sense of responsibility, creativity and decision-making powers. The second seeks to shape the attitudes of workers by appealing to values of cooperation, integration and self-esteem.”[8] The bitter irony is that these values, now at the service of profit-making firms, have historically been part of the emancipatory discourse of movements like socialism and feminism.
Over the past decade, women activists have successfully placed gender issues on the agendas of the most powerful labor organizations in Brazil. Women’s departments have been created in many locals, and in 1986 the National Women Worker’s Commission (CNMT) was created within the Unified Worker’s Federation (CUT). This commission has approved measures to force employers to recognize maternity rights, and has implemented campaigns against gender-based discrimination, violence and sexual harassment in the workplace. In addition, the CUT has approved a quota system to assure women leadership positions within union structures and has recognized domestic workers’ organizations. The federation has also worked to change the male-oriented nature of traditional labor organizing.
Feminist labor organizers have made gender relations among their male comrades a focal point of their efforts. The goal is to change the traditional union attitudes which reward standard male behavior, such as speaking loudly at meetings, and which fail to recognize how women’s domestic obligations limit the extent of their union participation. CONTAG, one of the biggest union confederations of Latin America, made a significant symbolic gesture by referring to its big March 1998 policy meeting as the “Seventh National Congress of Men and Women Rural Workers,” formally recognizing that labor is not only the domain of men.
But these are small, initial steps. “It is not enough to be revolutionary during elections and to call on women to come out and participate in events,” says Patricia, a member of the directorate of the Department of Women of the Union of Bank Employees in Bahia, who is also a member of the Communist Party of Brazil and the Union of Brazilian Women.[9] “It is also not enough to include a paragraph about women’s rights in all political speeches as is currently in vogue. We have opened up a discussion about gender among men and women, and we are sponsoring several debates about sexual harassment, even within labor unions.”
At CUT events, child care is always provided. In the Union of Bank Employees in Bahia, as a result of a 1993 initiative of its Women’s Department, members have openly debated a number of controversial issues such as homophobia among workers. Issues like women’s double workday, sexuality and affection are actively debated in the union.[10] In the 1990s, women’s organizations within unions even spread to other political arenas, including some which have long been considered difficult to organize. There are domestic workers’ unions throughout Brazil. In many states, as is the case in Bahia, domestic-worker organizers are also active militants in black social movements. According to CONTAG, women now compose 22% of the nine million union members in rural areas, more than half of whom became involved after 1985.[11] And women’s centers have sprouted within the organizations of landless workers in various states, particularly in the context of leadership training.
“We are like society,” says Valdirene de Oliveira, a 24-year-old Landless Movement (MST) leader in Matto Grosso, “and society is comprised of all kinds of people. Male dominance is strong, something that begins by educating boys to be macho. We will achieve equality by educating men and women within the Movement. Before, women stayed in the kitchen, but we are becoming more involved in everything, in land invasions, in meetings, and we also want to discuss health, rights and our relationships with men.”
Valdirene, who followed her parents into the movement at age 15, sees the struggle for women’s rights as “part of the class struggle,” and this is a growing sentiment within the MST. “The issue of the ownership of land,” she says, “attracts women’s attention within the Movement, and we are fighting to recognize women’s land ownership rights, along with legal rights to benefit from land. On the other hand, we have to work harder to equalize relationships within the family, because many times a woman signs a land deed because her husband insists. This kind of pressure often exists within the family. By beginning with issues like land, we can address others, like domestic violence, AIDS prevention, and the relationships between men and women.”[12]
Not all feminists, of course, even class-based feminists, agree completely with Valdirene’s perspective. Women in CONTAG and in the Rural Women’s Movement (MMTR), for example, while strongly supporting the struggle for land, consider that not all issues are class issues, and that there are conflicts between women and men that go beyond class-based identities. Nonetheless, the implementation of quotas for women’s leadership is a real achievement, and all feminists agree that the fight for affirmative action laws and policies that guarantee the rights of women workers must continue.
In spite of the gains made by feminists within labor organizations and the increase of women’s labor organizing, however, union members recognize that a daunting problem still faced by women workers is the lack of job stability in an increasingly insecure and flexible labor market. Trade unionists and leftist activists have recognized that strategies to confront gender- and race-based inequalities must not be limited to the institutions of the labor movement itself. Labor organizations must confront the reorganization of work, including the implementation of technologies which make workers redundant. Feminists and political parties linked to unions must also begin to forcefully counter the neoliberal attacks on workers in the name of productivity and modernization.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s class-based feminism can be found in unions, in leftist political groups and in struggles that are armed when necessary, such as the landless movement. This women’s movement challenges the contention that women should abandon the revolutionary project of creating a classless society. Instead, it advances a radical feminist project to eliminate a multitude of oppressions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mary Garcia Castro teaches sociology at the Universidade Federal da Bahia and is an associate researcher at the International Migration Studies Center of the University of Campinas in Brazil. She is the co-author, with Elsa Chaney, of Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (Temple, 1989). Translated from the Spanish by Marcial Godoy-Anativia.
NOTES 1. Cristina Bruschini, “Genero e Trabalho Feminino no Brasil. Novas Conquistas ou Persistencias da Discriminacão?” Seminario Trabalho e Genero: Mudanças, Permanancias e Desafios. Conference sponsored by the Brazilian Association for Population Studies, Campinas, April 14-15, 1998. 2. Cristina Bruschini, “Genero e Trabalho Feminino no Brasil. Novas Conquistas ou Persistencias da Discriminacão?” 3. Confederacão dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (1997) Plenaria Nacional das Mulheres (Brasilia: CONTAG/mimeo, 1997). 4. Mary Garcia Castro, “Genero e Poder no Espaco Sindical,” Estudos Feministas, Vol 3. No 1, 1995, pp. 29-51; also see Liliana Segnini, Mulheres no Trabalho Bancario. (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998). 5. Eleonora Menicucci de Oliveira, “Corpos Saudaveis e Corpos Doentes na Nova Organizacão Social do Trabalho,” Seminario Trabalho e Genero: Mudancas, Permanancias e Desafios. Conference sponsored by the Brazilian Association for Population Studies, Campinas, April 14-15, 1998. 6. Liliana Segnini, Mulheres no Trabalho Bancario. (São Paulo: Edusp, 1998). 7. Magda de Almeida Neves, “Modenizacão Industrial no Brasil: O Surgimento de Novos Paradigmas na Organizacão do Trabalho,” Paper presented at Congreso Latinoamericano de Sociologia del Trabajo, Mexico City, 1993. 8. Magda de Almeida Neves, “Modenizacão Industrial no Brasil: O Surgimento de Novos Paradigmas na Organizacão do Trabalho.” 9. Personal interview, Bahía, Brazil, August 1998. 10. Mary Garcia Castro, “Genero e Poder no Espaco Sindical,” Estudos Feministas, Vol 3. No 1, 1995, pp. 29-51. 11. Confederacão dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura, Plenaria Nacional das Mulheres (Brasilia: CONTAG/mimeo, 1997). 12. Miriam Abramovay and Mary Garcia Castro, Engendrando um Novo Feminismo: Mulheres Lideres de Bases (São Paulo: UNESCO/ Ed. Cortez, 1998).
