Os Conflitos de um conflito: processos trabalhistas ajuizados nas Juntas de conciliação e julgamento de Belo Horizonte durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939-1945)

Abstract

This master thesis analyzes the judicial processes whose contents refer to the impacts of World War II, which were filed at the Conciliation and Judgment Boards of Belo Horizonte between 1939 and 1945, in order to identify the potential consequences of the conflict both in labor relations and in the relations established between the procedural parties and labor regulatory institutions. Aimed at solving individual claims, those processes express the political-social dynamics of the world of labor in its daily manifestations, reproducing the voices of workers, employers and the State, represented by its magistrates. These documents were read to examine how the war effort was reappropriated by employers and employees as an argumentative strategy in the sphere of struggle comprised by the field of Labor Justice. Given that discrimination against the Germans, Italians and Japanese acquired large proportions in the city during the war period and that the struggles enabled the formation of class consciousness, we analyze, through the labor conflicts, how nationalism and xenophobia were added to this process of construction in Brazil, insofar as they contributed to the rising of a new notion about the "Brazilian working class". Beside the lawsuits, laws, decrees and regulations elaborated as a result of the war were also investigated in order to point out its repercussions on labor lawsuits. News about the conflict and about the movements it aroused in the city were also selected from the Estado de Minas newspaper, national and international. Those newspapers were chosen as sources because they are easily accessible, and also because the newspapers in general, along with the radio, were one of the main information vehicles through which the Belo Horizonte population became aware of the events related to the world conflict. All sources were qualitatively approached and labor lawsuits were also examined qualitatively and serially. In this way, the laws, the lawsuits and the newspaper articles were read and interpreted meticulously, in order to extract much more than was apparently exposed in their texts. The serial approach was applied in the analysis of the lawsuits, because they are sources with some level of homogeneity, which allowed to quantify and serialize the information found and to present the regularities in the procedural steps that, in some way, evidenced transformations generated by World War II in labor relations in Belo Horizonte. From this research work we could conclude that even in a context in which nationalism, industrialization and regulation of conflicts between capital and labor were characteristic features of a State project, the workers were aware of the Decree-laws created as a result of the war and that, and used them, as well as the patriotic discourse, as strategies of argumentation in order to claim for their rights