O trabalho feminino e os conflitos trabalhistas na Fábrica de Tecidos Othon Bezerra de Melo durante o Regime Militar(1967-1969)

Abstract

The analysis of the labor trajectory faced by workers in the textile sector is an object of deep interest, and it is necessary to highlight all the struggles and forms of resistance waged by these individuals in the search for a dignified life and better working conditions. On many occasions, the law of supply and demand imposes low wages on textile workers. This mainly affects women workers, who, due to lack of employment options, end up submitting themselves to the precarious conditions of the factory environment. Motivated by extreme need and seeking a better life, textile workers were subject to low wages and degrading conditions imposed by the employers. This was repeated in most of the labor claims of the period studied, above all, in the factories of the Othon Bezerra de Melo Group, and which also extended to other companies in the field. Although in the first decades of the 20th century the textile industry was experiencing great growth in Pernambuco, we observe that the treatment of weavers has not changed since the 1930s and 1940s. On the contrary, in the 1960s and 1970s, the number of complaints of mistreatment, repression and harassment inside textile factories. Having access to the collection of Collective Bargains of the textile industries, existing in the Memorial da Justiça do Trabalho and as a researcher of the PIC-UFRPE in 2019, we chose to work on the theme of the textile workers of the Fabric Factory of the Othon Bezerra de Melo group, in the period that goes from 1967 to 1969, even transposing this temporality to other times and spaces. With the objective of analyzing the strikes and demands of the factory workers and, above all, how they became targets of police repression