Generational succession in the union: reconfiguring political activism. The case of the ABC Metalworkers'

Abstract

Every kind of heritage involves material and symbolic elements, as well as the delicate problem of succession. The same happens to the political heritage of the labor movement that has taken place at the Brazilian metropolitan area known as ABC (Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano do Sul - State of São Paulo, Brazil). This heritage can be thought of in at least two dimensions. The first one has to do with political heritage in a wider sense: the experience of the metallurgist working class. The second one is specifically related the union movement, i.e., the heritage of the metallurgist´s union at ABC - which involves not only the union´s leadership, but also the dispute around political practices and conceptions. In this article I intend to examine the second of this heritage: the process, within the ABC unionism, of establishing and transmission of a set of political practices. I am also interested in the effects of these for the formation of different generations of leadership of metallurgist working class. The data will be presented was collected the activities of a research project developed between 2011 and 2013. It main objectives were to analyze the processes by which some members of metallurgic working class were made leaderships of the Union of Metallurgic workers of ABC (SMABC), from 1972 to 2002 and (ii) to constitute a collective biography, or a prosopography of this group, taking into account these three decades, so important for Brazilian labor movement. In order to respond to the various dimensions involved on the sociological phenomenon of workers political activism, the research was conceived as a prosopograhical study, followed by a biographical study of the unionists that represent different "types of political career".