What can we learn from the truckers' strike?

The dismantling of labor laws, planned and approved during the Temer administration, has a clear objective: to reduce the power of public regulation of labor. In other words, what the labor reform did was remove the State and unions from the equation, leaving workers to their own devices in defining their working conditions. Those who defend this dismantling seem to imagine that a bank employee, for example, is capable of sitting at the negotiating table with Itaú or Bradesco on equal footing and conditions.

The labor reform attacks all stages of the employment relationship, from beginning to end. It starts with forms of hiring, legalizing absurd practices such as exclusive and continuous self-employment, outsourcing of core business activities, and "odd jobs," now legalized under the name of intermittent work. Then it weakens the rules regarding working hours, remuneration, and health and working conditions. It also involves breaking the employment relationship, facilitating mass layoffs, removing the need for union approval of terminations, paving the way for non-payment of severance pay, and leaving workers without the right to unemployment insurance. Finally, the reform attacks the period after termination, completely emptying the role of labor courts and practically preventing workers from claiming unpaid rights from companies.

In a recent article, Vitor Filgueiras and José Dari Krein highlight how transportation companies generate their workforce: "The hiring of drivers without formalizing an employment relationship follows the same logic: it's a labor management strategy. It's common for supposedly self-employed drivers (often hired as legal entities) to always work exclusively for the same company, with schedules and freight prices unilaterally imposed by the contracting party. These drivers' pay depends exclusively on the number of freight trips completed, and their work is meticulously monitored by satellite/GPS. Companies also direct these activities by imposing tight deadlines and penalties for delays. In short, there is a series of evidences of the complete lack of autonomy of these 'self-employed' workers."

The authors point out that with this form of management, companies do not need to pay any labor rights (vacation pay, 13th-month salary, FGTS [Brazilian severance fund], termination penalty, etc.) and even transfer the cost of inputs such as fuel, tires, and vehicle maintenance to the worker. And here lies the crux of the matter. Self-employed workers begin to operate within a logic of individual struggle and, not perceiving themselves as salaried workers, they begin to see the cost of inputs as their main problem, not their outdated remuneration. Hence the fact that the main demand of the truckers' strike was the reduction of fuel prices through tax reductions, an issue that often overlaps with the business owners' own agenda. Fuel prices are an important issue and should be debated through the lens of Petrobras's misguided pricing policy, which, since the Temer government, has followed international fluctuations, generating enormous volatility. This problem will not be solved by reducing taxes or withdrawing resources from the public budget.

Another example with a major impact in recent years is Uber drivers. The logic is the same. Drivers must follow conduct standards defined by Uber, the car must meet specifications defined by Uber, the price of rides is set by Uber, Uber imposes performance evaluations on drivers and can even remove them from the registry in case of negative reviews. Even so, these drivers are not Uber employees. They are self-employed workers without labor rights and responsible for all input costs.

Labor reform, coupled with the economic crisis and new labor-saving technologies, opens the possibility for this logic of unregulated work to spread to other sectors of the economy. A little-analyzed aspect of this process is precisely the weakening of the collective struggle of workers for greater income distribution through wage increases. Therefore, this is an important moment to emphasize the fight for democracy and the election of candidates committed to workers. It is also essential to value the class organizations that play a fundamental role in organizing the working class in the struggle for a just and democratic society and the expansion of individual and collective rights.