Mutirão, trabalho e formação humana: forjando novas relações entre o saber e o poder

Abstract

This work focuses on practices of professional and political training organized and directed by workers and militants that joined them, in a path of solidarity and resistance on the shop floor and with a known history in the worker's environment. The theme is the historical construction of political subjects, through work and education, which takes place in the relationship with work. The working class happens in the daily life and builds itself in the process of resistance to the power of the factory, allowing for the struggles from knowledge. The resistance follows the perfecting of the means for exploiting the workers with the surfacing of new forms of struggle within the factory. This is the period of the reignition of social movements, of the wearing out of the military dictatorship, with the worker's strikes and mobilizations in which the union opposition grew stronger. The Mutirão (Task Force) group began to organize the safe havens to those that had been dismissed at the strikes, stating its project of building school-workshops so as to provide employment to them and go on to strengthening the union opposition. The workers' experience advances with the attempt to transform through education the culture and the group articulates itself with the community movements and with the Progressive Catholic Church, with the intent of advancing the popular struggle. Part of the experiment is developed in the preparation and triggering of the strikes of 1978 and 1979, which allowed the workers to have their visibility in the media and in politics and worked as an education for the inhabitants of neighborhoods, workers of the region, advancing their role in consolidating citizenship. The experience acquired in the struggles within the factories is extremely important, for this perspective, as it meant a permanent process of educating the educators and experiencing solidarity practices. The process for building a school with workers' education, its relations with the neighborhood inhabitants, the relationship with Italian unionism are also part of the scope of this work. What is surprising about all of these narratives is that the education goes through the factory, the neighborhood and the union as well as strikes, cultural, religious and political activities and, in this case, it culminates in the institutionalizing of a labor school for workers, a process filled with political-pedagogical tensions. In this process, the sectors of the working class form, among the working situations and the other relations they experience in their community day-to-day life. All of these narratives show the constant becoming of class consciousness and identity.