A social history of the Labor Courts: the struggle for workers' rights (1930-1970)

Abstract

During his stay at the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT-Unicamp), Prof. Oliver Dinius will participate in ongoing research conducted under the auspices of the special thematic project (FAPESP) intitule Trabalhadores, Legislação e Justiça do Trabalho (anos 1930-1970). He will regularly meet with the members of the main research group to discuss the potential uses of the archival records from the Brazilian labor courts as source for the social history of work. He will actively contribute to the progress of the collective as well as individual research projects at CECULT, above all by helping to systematize the research that is being conducted based on thousands of labor court cases that have been digitized as part of the specific thematic project. Another central objective for Prof. Dinius's stay will be to develop criteria to compare labor court cases from Volta Redonda that he used during his dissertation research with the labor court cases from São Paulo microfilmed at CECULT. The visiting researcher will also participate in oral history interviews with workers, lawyers, and judges that appeared or worked in the labor courts. The lead researcher, Prof. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, and the visiting researcher will co-author a scholarly article that compares the influence of the German and Italian labor justice systems, respectively, on the creation and institutional form of the Brazilian labor justice system. Throughout his stay, Prof. Dinius will offer advice to advanced undergraduate and graduate students on their research projects in the area of labor history and the history of the labor law. He will also participate in the seminars of the research groups (linhas de pesquisa) on labor history and cultural history, whose joint meetings include the professors and graduate students associated with CECULT. Prof. Dinius is prepared to give talks and hold seminars, both on his work at CECULT and on other ongoing and recently concluded research projects. He has already agreed to present papers at the international symposium "Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth: História e Pesquisa" in May 2010 and at the Tenth international Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) in Brasília (Jul 2010), for which he organized a panel on the history of the labor courts in Brazil that will also the lead researcher and two other scholars associated with CECULT. Lastly, Prof. Dinius will offer a mandatory course ("Special Topics in Social History") at the graduate level. The course will build on his research and focus on the social history of industrial work in its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. Prof. Dinius's participation in the research projects at CECULT will help to broaden and deepen its research agenda pursued under the special thematic project, specifically with respect to the line of research that focuses on the significance of the judicial arena as space where workers fight for their rights. (AU)