Resumen de Workers, Owners, and Lawyers in Brazil’s Labor Justice System. A Review of Larissa Rosa Corrêa’s A tessitura dos direitos: patrões e empregados na Justiça do Trabalho, 1953-1964 (São Paulo: LTR, 2011.)
Larissa Rosa Corrêa’s A tessitura dos direitos: Patrões e empregados na Justiça do Trabalho, 1953-1964 new book, presented to the University of Campinas as a master’s thesis in 2007, bears comparison to other recent works coming out of UNICAMP’s history department and, in particular, that department’s Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura, the author’s uncovering of documentary materials that were feared lost or have otherwise been unavailable to historians sets it apart from other first books. Corrêa describes A tessitura dos direitos as providing an “analysis of negotiations and conflicts between industrialists and workers in the labor-justice system” in São Paulo (215), which it does, focusing particularly on the state capital while also considering cases originating in certain industrial cities of the state’s further interior. This analysis is embedded in a work that may be divided into two parts. The first, consisting of roughly half of the introduction, most of the first chapter, and a few portions of the rest of the book, is a descriptive guide to aspects of Brazil’s labor-justice system. The second, found in chapters two through four, is a mostly narrative re-creation of particular legal struggles involving textile operatives and metalworkers. Taken together, the two parts document the intersection of judicial conflicts with extra-judicial struggles and introduce several memorable historical actors who figure in few works of history but who played significant roles in the negotiation of labor law and workers’ rights during Brazil’s postwar republic (1945-1964).
