Workers at Brazilian aerospace giant Embraer rejected a new collective agreement at a mass meeting on September 24. The deal would have cut numerous benefits and offered no real wage increase. The employees have been without a collective agreement since 2017 and without a real wage increase for around ten years.

Among other things, the agreement proposed by the group eliminated the guarantee of job stability for employees with occupational diseases and victims of work-related accidents. In addition to rejecting this proposal and a five percent wage increase, workers are demanding a doubling of their food voucher, which is currently R$400 (US$72).

Significantly, the workers discussed the possibility of a strike, but decided to wait for a new proposal from the company, which was not received. If they leave, they will join the 33,000 Boeing workers in the US who have been on strike since September 14th.

The positions taken by these companies in global commercial and military aerospace manufacturing express the enormous potential of a unified struggle as ruling elites become increasingly concerned about the radicalization of these workers. Boeing is the world’s second-largest manufacturer of civil/commercial and military aircraft, while Embraer ranks third in commercial aircraft and generates about 10 percent of its revenue from military aircraft sales.

A crucial role in isolating and betraying the struggle of workers at Embraer and other companies in the important industrial region of São José dos Campos, in the countryside of Brazil’s richest and most industrialized state, São Paulo, has been played by the São José dos Campos Metalworkers’ Union (SindmetalSJC). This union is affiliated with the CSP-Conlutas trade union federation and is led by bureaucrats from the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers’ Party (PSTU).

The Embraer workers’ fight comes after GM workers in São José dos Campos also rejected a contract proposal and SindmetalSJC forced workers to accept a new voluntary layoff program that has already resulted in the loss of more than 700 workers in the past year work has led.

SindmetalSJC is following the same course as during the GM workers’ struggle, spreading the illusion that Embraer workers can resolve their burning issues at the negotiating table and putting pressure on the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party – PT). , to make multi-billion investments in the company.

The nationalist program defended by SindmetalSJC, Conlutas and the PSTU, based on pressure on the bourgeois state, is completely hostile to the interests of workers and has led to a drastic deterioration in the living standards of the working class over the last decade. These forces are hostile to an international strategy to confront transnational corporations and are in favor of tightening cuts in order to maintain the activity of transnational corporations in Brazil.

Successive local, state and federal governments, including that of the PT, have, with the support of the pseudo-left-controlled unions, defended tax cuts and subsidies for companies like GM to protect jobs, but in reality workers in different countries and even different cities compete against each other in a race to the bottom.