Wednesday, 27/6

There was a bus strike in Recife today, which made getting to school difficult, and getting to CCJ pretty much impossible. Although strikes are technically illegal in Brazil, they happen anyway because of former President Lula's past organizing union strikes when he was a metalworker. The most common strikes that I've experienced in Brazil are bus, post office, and schoolteacher strikes.  In Bahia, even the police went on strike. While I understand that workers deserve a fair wage and decent benefits, most of the time these strikes just end up hurting the working class. Take the bus strike for example. The drivers and the fare collectors asked for a salary increase of 27%. They shut down the bus system for 24 hours as a notice. The bus companies offered a wage increase of 2%. But with these strikes, the ones who suffer are Brazilians from the lower classes who depend on the buses to get to work. With the strike, the low class makes less money to support their families as they miss work. The lady who cleans the house where I'm staying lives over an hour away by bus. She can't walk to work, she can't afford a car, and she can't afford to take a taxi to work either. So she didn't make it to work, losing her day's wages. She complains about the strike, but there isn't really much she can do. So, the people whom the strikes affect the most, are those with the least amount of power to make changes. The upper class Brazilians all drive to work, so the bus strikes don't affect them at all. If bus drivers really wanted to strike effectively, they would use their buses to block off the entrances to rich neighborhoods so that the people who lived there couldn't get in or out. I guarantee that the people from those areas would be much faster in complaining to the bus companies and that resolutions between the companies and the unions would occur much faster. The way the system is now, bus drivers are basically shooting themselves in the foot by negatively impacting the people from their own social class.