BRAZIL: Megaprojects Revive Class Struggle
The rage was proportional to the size of the crowd cornered between the jungle and the wall that will dam up the Madeira River in northwest Brazil. Over the space of three days, workers set fire to some 50 buses and other vehicles, work installations and even their own lodgings, which were built to house 16,000 people.
The uprising broke out on Mar. 15, bringing to a halt work on the Jirau dam, one of two large hydroelectric dams under construction in the Amazon jungle state of Rondônia. The agreement for better working conditions eventually reached by representatives of the trade union and the consortium building the dam did not automatically bring the situation back to normal.
The problem is that because most of the workers are from distant regions, they will only be able to resume work after the employee housing is rebuilt. Moreover, the consortium announced that thousands had been laid off.
But the rioting in Jirau triggered a series of strikes at other mega construction projects, like energy plants, ports, an oil refinery and a petrochemical complex, which employ tens of thousands of construction workers, mainly in the north and northeast, the poorest regions in Brazil.
Some 160,000 workers went on strike in March, according to a study released May 12 by the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Research (DIEESE), a research centre that supports trade unions.
The unrest in Jirau was caused by the fact that thousands of workers are 'confined there in poor conditions and treated in an authoritarian manner,' said José Dari Krein, director of the Centre for Union Studies and the Economy of Labour at the State University of Campinas.
The dam-building project employed 22,000 people before the conflict. Similar problems had led to a riot nine months earlier, in Santo Antonio, the other large dam under construction on the Madeira River, 120 km from Jirau. In that protest, 35 buses were destroyed and work stalled for several days. In both Santo Antonio and Jirau, the catalyst was abusive treatment of a worker.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service