Logistics, power resources and the strike of Brazilian truckers in 2018

Work in logistics and transport has moved to the centre of attention of labour studies in the past few years. One of the central assumptions of this research is that workers in this sector command the power to block so called choke points, crucial nodes where commodities have to pass, like ports and warehouses, providing these workers with extraordinary power. In the study Logistik, Machtressourcen und politische Ökonomie des Rohstoffexports about the 11 day long strike of truck drivers and petroleum platform workers that occured in Brazil in 2008, Jörg Nowak contends the assumption that the power to block choke points is sufficient for effective exercise of power of workers. In this guest post, Jörg provides a summary of the main argument in English.

The strike in 2018 was extremely successful in blocking the Brazilian economy due to the central position of self-employed truck drivers, with about 400,000 truck drivers erecting more than 700 blockades all over the country. The immediate trigger of the strike was an increase in the price of diesel fuel, but there were underlying structural reasons for the conflict. The government faced considerable challenges to end the strike via negotiations, and the strike only stopped when the workers of state-owned petroleum giant Petrobas joined in and subsequently the CEO of Petrobras, Pedro Parente, stepped down. He had introduced a new price policy to adapt diesel prices to the world market price on a daily basis.

While the mobilisation seems successful at first glance, the deal reached by truckers only included small changes, and even those were not adopted by the successor government of Bolsonaro, which started its terms only six months after the strike. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro was able to avoid a second strike in April 2019 by negotiating a support package for truckers, which also did not lead to a sustainable betterment of the truckers’ problems. This was in part because some leaders of truckers have established a friendly relationship with the right-wing Bolsonaro government. In other words, the strike was very successful to block choke points but failed to improve the working and living conditions of truckers.

I argue in this analysis that the sector of road freight transport suffers from structural problems that cannot be solved with a focus on sectoral solutions. First of all, an excess capacity of truck drivers has led to a collapse of freight prices since 2014 when Brazil entered into an economic crisis. Thus, the costs of truckers are higher than the prices they get from shippers. Due to the strong position of shippers, especially in retail, agribusiness and industry, truckers are not able to negotiate better prices or to urge the government to regulate prices. Both the Temer and Bolsonaro governments started a policy of minimum prices, but they are neither able nor willing to implement sufficient controls for these prices to be actually paid. Second, better working conditions for truckers require less congested roads, i.e. less truckers or less freight on the roads.

In other words, the paradoxical situation of the truckers is that a part of them has to move to other sectors in order for conditions in the sector to get better. Nevertheless, this requires that comparable jobs are available in other sectors, which is highly questionable. It also requires a massive investment program into removal of freight by rail and water transport. This has been a policy of successive governments but will require several years to be realised. Third, a nationally focused policy on energy prices is required which is unlikely due to the current ultraliberal administration.

In sum, solutions that ameliorate the situation of Brazilian truckers require broad policies across a number of political areas. This puts into question analyses that focus on the power of truckers to block choke points, but also analyses like the power resources approach, which believe that the context-appropriate use of different power resources by workers can lead to successful action.

By contrast, I contend that a broadly understood political economy of labour that includes structural contexts of the social formation and the world market into the analysis is necessary to understand which strategies of workers can be met with success. Moreover, the recourse to power resources in analyses of labour conflicts tends to remove political conflicts, and political divisions among workers from sight.

Jörg Nowak is a Postdoc Researcher in the ERC project "European Unions" at University College Dublin. His recent publications include Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India (Palgrave, 2019).