O fantasma da classe ausente : as tradições corporativas do sindicalismo e a crise de legitimação do SUS

Abstract

This thesis highlights the centrality of corporative union behavior in understanding the process of commodification of healthcare in Brazil. It argues that by negotiating the context of workers’ health in a corporatist fashion, the union movement propels the private supplementary health industry, thus undermining the consolidation of a widely-based political movement in favor of the SUS (the constitutionally-mandated universal public health care system). Using analysis of empirical data, this thesis is able to characterize the extant association between the process of labor formalization and the expansion of the presence of private health care in unions’ collective bargaining agreements, in addition to the institutionalization of private healthcare in other instances that define worker’s health. Building on this evidence, we aim to problematize the subordinate placement of the relationship between unions and privately-contracted, collective health plans in the framing of the main theses of sanitarist thought. Using an historic-analytic approach, we proceed to unearth the roots of this debate, investigating the traditions of corporatist thought in Brazil through the Catholic Church’s Social Doctrine and the language of liberal neo-corporatism. In concluding, we show that successful execution of the ethical, scientific and republican political principles that ungird the SUS is incompatible with this model of corporatist behavior. Since it is necessary that the cultivation of a political culture of worker’s rights develops alongside unionization, it is imperative to institutionalize this theme as the centerpiece of reflections that occupy programmatic thought surrounding collectivized health care.