Class conflicts in decision making processes of the Superior Labor Court (1946-1968)

Abstract

The central aim of this study is to investigate the interference of different actors (judges, lawyers, workers and employers) in decision-making processes of the labor courts. This will be possible by analyzing the appeals filed by the parties at the last court, the Superior Labor Court, from 1946 to 1968. The main sources consist of the debates records and decisions of the judges contained in the shorthand notes of the TST, which constitute a rich set of documents and virtually untouched by researchers. I will analyze sentences for over twenty years, looking at how the TST judges, in favor of either party, gave their decisions facing the pressures of the labor movement and the employer class. I try to understand how did happen changes and continuities regarding the rights of workers from so-called "individual bargaining", keeping in mind the impacts of these changes in the workers struggle for rights and in own social legislation. Thus, I start from the hypothesis that conflicts of classes present in individual bargaining had a very close relationship with a "collective dimension of rights," insofar as it could be drivers of change in labor legislation.