Workers Before the Court

Law and justice are studied in this book from the perspective of social andglobal history. The main focus of Workers Before the Tribunal is toovercome traditional binary oppositions between corporativist andcontratualist models of labor relations, the former representing a view inwhich the working class would have more autonomy in struggling for betterlabor conditions, the latter meaning the protagonism of the State inpromoting labor rights. Teixeira da Silva presents three main arguments. First, he shows that the Brazilian labor justice system created during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1930-1945), although inspired by Mussolini's legalorder in Italy, is very different from the Fascist Magistratura del Lavoro. Second, in his comparative analysis with other national cases, such as theUnited States, France, Germany and Australia, the author argues that therewas a large circulation of ideas and practices, resulting in a more complexdynamic of appropriation of international ideas on labor rights andinstitutions in Brazil. Third, Teixeira da Silva demonstrates that litigation in labor courts was one strategy of the working-class movement in Brazil, together with strikes and other means of confrontation. Therefore, he questions historiographical and politicalapproaches that see labor justice as a weak substitute for classaction. The "jurisdictionalization" of labor relations became aconstitutive element in the making of the Brazilian working class. The book is anchored in the research of hundreds of labor litigation cases during the dramatic months preceding the 1964 civil-military coup d’état that inaugurated a quarter century of dictatorial rule in Brazil.