Resistance and organized counter-resistance in conflict areas: an ethnography with Embraer's workers

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the specificity of the conflict between capital and labor in the context of a global company like EMBRAER that has a strong influence in the region where it is located in Sao Jose dos Campos in São Paulo, Brazil. Since the resignation mass held by Embraer of more than four thousand workers in 2009 intensified labor conflicts, resistance movements of workers as strikes, labor mobilizations, labor, dissatisfactions and union complaints against the company that had adopted a flexible paradigm organization. Interestingly, these areas of conflict is explained in an unprecedented way a counter-resistance organized movement of employees whose culmination was a decision contrary to the continuation of a strike erupted in 2014. It was thought until then that the counteraction to union resistance movement of workers occurred only ideologically, personal or small groups despite being beneficiaries of the shares, never participate in such movements. This time participated, managers and technicians were organized against union resistance movement in defense of the values of the company to settle with the movement and unseat union leaders seeking to address labor dissatisfaction.

In the contemplation of this study was carried out an ethnographic approach to mold a study of extended case reasoned by the Public Sociology (see Burawoy, 2005). The ethnography option was due to its ability to identify how the contemporary global capitalism processes are mediated locally with various effects on the lives of workers, a difficult reality for the foundation of an opposition unions and the left in Brazil. The research process began in the Metalworkers Union of São José dos Campos and Region and approaches with the workers of Embraer were held for two years. The main conclusion of the article points out that there is a dialectic of conflict in contemporary capitalism than the same time promoting the workers’ resistance movements also reveals the effectiveness of consent policies of the typical business of post-Fordism, which in this case was manifested if as an unprecedented move against resistance-organized.