“Class justice”: courts, rural workers and memory

Abstract

Evaluations of the functioning and performance of the Labor Courts in the 1945-1964 period have been heavily influenced by a memory of the Left that locates teleologically in the civilian-military coup d’état the outcome that is said to have dominated the whole history of the institution and, above all, the relation of workers with the Labor Courts. The option of the nationalist trade union movement, under the hegemony of the Left, to act within the institutional sphere in order to struggle for rights is said to have obscured the fact that the Labor Justice system was “class justice” in the service of the bosses and the State’s projects of domination. This memory, almost without mediations, was transformed into historical explanation. The article seeks to deal with this memory by examining the articulation of the urban labor movement with rural workers in the state of São Paulo at a moment of profound change in labor relations in the countryside. In order to do so, the study focuses on trade union action in the Labor Courts, which significantly altered former notions of gifts and favors in rural areas.