Can Social Dialogue be Transformational in a Socially Polarised Brazil? Labour Relations under the Third Lula Administration

Abstract

Faced with a heterogeneous governing coalition and an unstable geopolitical scenario, the new Lula government is confronting many challenges to successfully enacting the social, economic and political reforms it promised during the 2022 presidential campaign. On the labour front, the current government has already made strides in rolling back some of the most regressive policies implemented during the Temer and Bolsonaro administrations that negated the possibility of real minimum wage increases and hobbled labour inspectors combatting modern-day slave labour. However, due to conflicting class interests, it will be more difficult to revoke key elements of the regressive 2017 labour law reform, which introduced new forms of precarious contracting, restricted access to the labour justice system, and curtailed union financing. This article will present a balance to date of the tripartite efforts to build and enact a pro-worker labour relations reform. We argue that the employers’ group’s path-dependent expectations to maintain many aspects of the previous labour law reform, together with labour’s diffuse support in the legislative branch, makes a more thorough-going reform that is advantageous for workers less likely to be implemented in the current conjuncture.