Dockers in the Brazilian port of Santos occupied two ships last April to resist the privatized COSIPA steel company's attempt to work its cargoes with non-union labor. Days after the occupation they launched a Web site, linking with the Liverpool dockers via the Internet and proclaiming "Santos Liverpool Amsterdam Seoul-One World, One Struggle."
Their dramatic act caught the attention of longshore workers around the world. Hundreds responded to their call to send faxes and e-mail to Brazilian President Enrique Cardoso.
Then suddenly the Web site went dead, calls and faxes to the Santos dockers went unreturned. At the Second International Dockers Conference in Montreal a month later, the Brazilian delegate's seat stayed empty, with others wondering uneasily what had happened. So when we heard the Brazilian dockers would be represented at the Western Hemisphere Workers Conference, it seemed an ideal chance to get the end of the story.
The Dispatcher caught up with Francisco Nogneira well into Saturday evening, after the conference's longshore caucus. Nogueira is vice president of the Sindicato dos Empregados Terrestres em Transportes Aquavarios do Estado de Sao Paolo, which represents a range of port workers, excluding stevedores.
Noguiera handled containers on board ships before being elected to his full-time union job. Union activism runs in the family: his father had been a leader in the stevedores union.
The occupation of the two ships in Santos lasted 28 days and attract-ed tremendous solidarity, Nogueira said. The strikers got no wages dur-ing this time, and survived on dona-tions from other union members. Sympathy strikes broke out at all Brazil's major ports and hundreds of dockers came to Santos and camped out on the dock by the occupied ships.
The government called in the federal police to end the occupation. when they entered the ships, the workers left peacefully. The strike was a partial victory Noguiera said, because it got a lot of media coverage and through that changed public opinion. "It passed a message about the situation of the stevedores," he said.
But the government did break the strike. Once the workers were off the ship, COSIPA brought in scabs. With their position weakening, the unions decided to compromise. The unions and the company are still negotiating the final terms of employment, but currently half the COSIPA ships are worked by union labor and half by non-union labor.
Half the union workers lost their jobs after the strike as COSIPA brought in casuals. These day workers, many drawn from the swelling ranks of Santos' unemployed, work for $200 per month, half the pre-strike rate for similar work.
As a steel company, COSIPA was a strategic target for the government, which is also trying to privatize other strategic industries, such as mining and oil. "The government doesn't privatize dead industries," Nogneira said. "It wants to attract foreign capital."
COSIPA is owned by Japanese capitalists, but functions as an arm of the Brazilian government - "unbrazo," Nogueira said, rolling back his sleeve and pointing to his forearm for emphasis. The attack on the dock-workers at Santos was premeditated by the government, he said, which wants to use this as a "recipe" for breaking the unions at the other ter-minals.
A second terminal in Santos was privatized Oct. 17. Within the month, some 2,000 workers there were casualized.
In putting down the COSIPA occupation the Brazilian government made use of deregulation legislation passed in 1993 for the first time. Conservative union leaders let these laws go through. Nogueira said. They didn't respond until the government cried out. Now a new generation of union leadership is reviving the militant spirit: we saw this at work in the occupation, he said.
Several other ports have already been privatized as part of Brazil's National Privatization Program, instituted in 1991. Santos is a holdout. Known as Brazil's "red city," it has a long history of struggle and was run by the Workers Party from 1988 to 1996.
In resisting casualization, Nogueira and the members of his union identify with the Liverpool dockers. The union maintains a Liverpool solidarity committee, and delivered a letter to the British consulate in Sao Paolo on the International Day of Action Sept. 8. It asked the government to intervene on behalf of the dockers. "Tony Blair is a labor prime minister, he should be able to do something, Nogueira said.
The Santos strike accelerated moves to unify the port unions, now divided into nine different unions. Each occupation has its own organization, among them stevedores, guards, checkers, clerks and several others. People were thinking about unification before the strike, but now it's a real project, Nogueira said. The workers see COSIPA as a warning of things to come, and unity as their best tool for resistance.
"The situation in Brazil is no different from anywhere else, especially Liverpool," Nogueira told the long-shore caucus at the Conference. The government has pushed deregulation and privatization. Neoliberalism is going forward and destroying the whole working class. People who work in the public sector are losing jobs to privatization. All kinds of workers are earning less and working harder.
"After the conference we need to continue the contact with unions of port workers around the world, 'sin fronteras,'" he said. "We unite to fight the market."
