Brazil's Strikes As Seen By "The World Socialist Web Site"

The World Socialist Web Site published a report on August 31, 2012, that confirms that most of the public employees on strike in Brazil have reached agreement with the government and will return to work.

The article offers a very different perspective on the strikes compared to what has appeared in most of the media coverage.  

The author sees the strikers' demands as reasonable and is critical of Dilma's response to the strikes.  He refers to the settlement by the unions as a "capitulation," and characterizes media coverage as attempting to "demonize" the strikers.

As an example of strike coverage by what the author calls the "big business media," he includes an excerpt from an editorial published in "Estadão" which praises Dilma's hard line in dealing with the strikers. 

The author reminds readers that Brazil's military dictatorship came about in part as a crack-down on labor unions, and goes on to say that "the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers Party) itself emerged largely on the back of a strike wave launched in defiance of military rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Given this history, Rousseff’s turn toward such measures has unmistakable significance."

He ends with this commentary: "The intensification of the world capitalist economic crisis is finding its expression in Brazil in the growth of class tensions that are exposing before ever larger sections of the working class the role played by the Workers Party and the unions that support it in defending capitalism." 

In spite of the author's sometimes polemical style, the article offers an interesting view that we don't often see.