A strike at the Scania-Vabis plant in the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo, in Greater São Paulo, unleashed one of the most important waves of workers' struggles of the second half of the twentieth century. Despite all the apparatus of repression available to the authorities, there were demonstrations involving tens of thousands of participants. This put the dictatorship on the defensive and obliged the bourgeois opposition to the regime to include the workers' demands (such as the right to strike) in their programs. In a number of places these struggles acquired an explicitly class character.1 This new thrust of workers' struggles was largely responsible for the creation of a combative trade union federation, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Unique Confederation of Workers-CUT),2 and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' party-PT). Created in 1980, the PT won important electoral victories in various Brazilian municipios (counties), and in 1989 it nearly won the Brazilian presidency when its chief personality, Luís Inácio da Silva (Lula), reached the second-stage runoff against Fernando Collor de Mello, the candidate of the right. This surge in the union and political aspirations of the Brazilian working class is all the more remarkable when we consider that, on the international level, the 1980s were marked by the decline of unions and political parties, especially those with a working-class base, and that in Brazil as in other countries of South America the economy broke with its long-term tendency to grow and entered into a deep recession combined with high levels of inflation, the so-called stagflation.
