Tom Murphy – The Wall Street Journal, 06/29/2012
SAO PAULO–Labor reform designed to loosen rather than tighten regulation has gained an unlikely ally in Brazil via one of the country’s largest, and most symbolically freighted, industrial unions.
“Brazil’s economy is entering the 21st century, but labor relations are stuck in the 19th,” said Sergio Nobre, president of Sao Paulo’s ABC region metal-workers union.
Mr. Nobre occupies the same modest office, in the same military-green union hall in the Sao Paulo suburbs, where Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva launched the modern Brazilian labor movement in the 1970s, a movement that would make Lula two-term president of Brazil three decades later.
